Change the start menu search so instead of finding local applications and files, it searches the internet.
Would be even funnier if it used the worst search engine available.
Oh wait…

I had a friend who sent me a “Y2K fix” program back in '99. Said it would patch the error so I’d be safe. When I ran it, it swapped the letters Y and K on my keyboard.

I shall write a virus that makes the computer play the “USB device detached” sound followed shortly by the “USB device attached” sound. Dee doo. Doo dee. Just that. three or four times a week.

Alt+Tab goes to a random window instead of being in the order of recency

I had a boss that wasn’t exactly technical. I wrote a power shell program that would randomly every 5-30 minutes give a pop-up that said “good job”, which he always said regardless of what was going on. Placed it in his startup folder on his machine. I thought he would figure it out and tell me to knock it off… Well I forgot about it, 9 months later during my annual performance review it popped up while I was looking at his screen. He apologized and just alt tabbed it away.

I offered to take a look and see if I couldn’t stop it, and he said yes and then walked away to take a break. I then deleted the script I put on there. He gave me extra performance points (meaning a higher pay raise.)

I was in college during the years leading up to y2k and supported myself at the time getting IT infrastructure ready. Some friends and I decided to write a “virus” that, on bootup, checks to see if the current date is in the first week of January 2000 and if it is and a backup of the fonts is not found (so it’ll only run once) then it’ll back up your fonts and alter the originals to replace the y character with the k. This affected everything system wide.

That created more chaos than anticipated.

At first it all seems normal, every now and then a random sound effect is replaced by ominous hooting. Every hour, on the hour, a green owl flashes on the screen for a frame or two, it’s eyes boring into you before vanishing. Once every 50 or so times it pumps your volume up, selects speakers as output and let’s loose a screeching hoot. Random popups slowly ramping up “Restart your streak today”, “Where did you go?”, “Duo misses you”. At first just once or twice a day, but steadily increasing in intensity till it’s one every 23 seconds.

I wrote a simple script once that ran in the background and all it did was toggle the state of the caps lock key every 30 minutes. I set it up on a co-worker’s computer as a scheduled task for an April Fools prank one year. I thought for sure he’d figure it out pretty quickly, but by mid-day, he had completely disassembled his keyboard, convinced the button was getting stuck due to gunk buildup. Eventually I ended up just disabling the task so he thought he had managed to fix it himself.

I’ll call it Windows 11.

I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.

I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school’s server that I shouldn’t have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students’ laptops interrupting the class at max volume.

Best bit? I “taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity” and didn’t get in (much) trouble!!

A virus that changes the font every time you go to a new page or hit refresh

Oh, I have a seemingly harmless idea so evil, it will ruin the internet forever.
I will make it so every time you open any website, there will be a popup with a question that asks you to invade your privacy, and you can allow it to do so with one click, but you will have to dig through menus if you want to avoid it. Then, after some seconds, another popup will appear, asking you to create a login, no matter what you do. Then, it randomly will ask you to share your location. Yes, with a popup again. Then, just as you thought you’re done, another window will open, grabbing your focus, which will demand you talk to a chatbot, and you can’t close this one, only slightly minimize it.

The version I recall was once if those Flash animations with a cute squirrel or whatever saying something… but it was really quiet so you’d need to turn up the volume to hear. Then partway through it changed to sex stuff and blasted out in a voice like a monster truck announcer

“anal sex dot com, all anal, all the time!”

I remember a harmless over that just randomly opened your CD tray while it ran. Called something like cup holder, or something like that.

Shit that was a long time ago…

In a programming class, one of my professors sometimes remolety opened the xeyes program (Linux program that opens a pair of eyes that follow your cursor) on students that were not paying a lot of attention.