I’ve done this one before on a couple of my fellow geeks. It’s super easy to do and will have even the most savvy individual scratching their head.

Step 1: First thing you need to do is take a screen shot of the victims desktop. Since I’m a designer I use the, “Print Screen”, option and then just paste into Photoshop. Make sure to get the bottom taskbar in the shot. The idea is to emulate the person’s desktop exactly.

Step 2: Once you have your screen shot cropped and saved set it as the desktop. To do this right click on the desktop and click on Properties. This will pull up the Display Properties panel.

Step 3: Right click on the desktop again and select, “Arrange Icons By”. Make sure to uncheck, “Show Desktop Icons”. This will hide their icons. See where I’m going with this?

Step 4: Right click on the taskbar and make sure to uncheck,”Lock the Taskbar”. Once you do this drag the task bar to the top of the screen.

Step 5: Right click on the bottom taskbar and go to properties. Click on, “Auto-hide the taskbar”.

The task bar will then disappear leaving the screen shot you took of the desktop with the icons in it’s place. The victim wont be able to open any files on the desktop or run any programs from the taskbar. Like I said I’ve done this to a couple buddies and watched them restart after restart start to pull out their hair. It’s a good obnoxious one that is harmless to the PC. Happy Pranking.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!