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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class.

It was dumb harmless fun.

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I knew someone that failed to prepare for their presentation, and did this as an excuse the presentation computer was not working and had to reschedule

My favorite trick was to take a screenshot of the desktop, hide all the icons and the task bar, then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. It gets even the most advanced users every time.

This is the one I used to do

I did this to a girl at school. It ended up moving all of her singer, and iTunes found them "again", so half of her songs would show an error "can't find this file", because it was pointing to the old location.

It was the prank that kept on giving.

It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.

> It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.

What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment?

Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.

It's a relatively small lab in a university and part of my job is keeping the computers running.

I could wipe, but I want to make as little work for my replacement as possible. Well, maybe a few minutes of extra work to get rid of a screensaver.

If it's a desktop workstation with lots of expensive development tools installed or a delicate toolchain (especially one in a lab), why spend the time and effort wiping the thing just to reinstall all of the same stuff over again? It might even be a shared computer. I remember my help desk summer job, I worked at a hot desk that was staffed 24/7 so the same computers were used by first, second, and third shift. There were a lot of things that had to be logged into (mainframes, customer email accounts, etc) and not all of the desktops covered the same customers so it would have been a nightmare to handle all of the images and configurations. Whenever a configuration had to change, they would make a new backup to cover that specific desktop in case it died.

I was always fond of this one.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...

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