Ultimate Halloween Computer Pranks and Tricks!

Halloween time here at Nexus is no tricks just geeks!

With Halloween just a blink away have you decided if you’re going to dress up spookily this October 31st?

Rumour has it there are some spooky things that may happen to your computer at this time of the year.

If you’re looking for the best Halloween computer tricks to test out on your work colleagues, family and friends you’ve come to the right place.

Here’s 5 haunted tricks which will leave your victim creeped out and completely curious.

1. Ghostly Keyboard

• Select your chosen victim and gain access to their computer at a time they’re not present
• Open up Microsoft Word
• Once Word has opened up select on the ‘Home’ tab situated at the top
• If you then look to the far top right part of the screen, you’ll see where it says ‘Replace’

• Click on ‘Replace’
• A box will then appear asking what word you want to change. It’s probably best to choose a frequently typed word such as ‘and’ or ‘the’

• Then in the ‘find what’ box type the word you want to replace and in the ‘replace with’ box type what you want it replaced with. (You may want to go for something scary like ‘I’m watching you’ or perhaps something a little more light-hearted like a Halloween riddle)
• Once you’re happy with everything click ‘Replace all’ this will then swap all of the words in the current document to the new word or phrase you’ve just set up.

Now for the exciting part, wait for your victim to become scared and extremely confused by their spooky keyboard!

2. Mysterious Mouse

Install remote access software such as TeamViewer on your victims computer. An ideal time to plot this computer trick would be on their lunchbreak. Wait patiently for your victim to return to their desk. As you will have full remote access to the computer you can begin moving their mouse around. If you play this trick subtly, you may get away with it for a few minutes! If you start whizzing the mouse around super quickly you’ll probably get found out in a matter of seconds.

Another alternative to this trick would be to swap the USB dongle with someone elses, ideally the person they sit next to (providing both use a wireless keyboard/ mouse). The USB dongle will be plugged into a USB port on the computer, so this would simply need removing and swapped around with the other persons. As a result of switching them around, this means their keyboard/mouse will be connected to a different computer.

3. Scary Screen

If you’re looking for a quick reaction change their desktop background picture to something terrifying like a clown’s face or a zombie. The more gruesome the better!

4. Spooky Sounds

You can change the sound notifications that a computer normally makes to something spooky!

How to change computer sounds on a Windows computer:

• Go to ‘Control Panel’

• Select ‘Hardware and Sound’
• Under where it says ‘Sound’ choose ‘Change system sounds’

• Under Program Events select the sound you wish to change e.g Calendar Reminder

• Then just below where it says sounds, scroll through the list until you find the desired sound you wish to change it to

• Press on the ‘test’ button if you want to test out the sound
• Once satisfied click ‘Apply’ then ‘OK’

Then simply wait until a notification pings for the new sound effect to take place.

5. Blue Screen Of Death

If the user uses a Windows machine why not creep them out with the dreaded blue screen of death. Find a blue screen of death wallpaper online and set it as their computer background.