Have you ever seen this message on your PC?

I’ll put it this way, you’ll only see that message if I’ve had a little time to sabotage your PC while you had your back turned. Believe me, I love PC pranks and jokes. I’ve been doing them for years – just ask my friends at work. Read on and I’ll tell you how to create one of the easiest, but most flexible pranks.

The VB Script Prank
First, open up your Windows Notepad or your favorite plain text editor. Now paste in the following text.

MsgBox “Windows has determined that you may not be smart enough to surf the internet. Click OK if you are stupid!”, 0, “Error”

Now save the file as joke.vbs

Finally, double click the file to test it. You should see the same message box I displayed above.

How does it work?
The VBS in joke.vbs, stands for Visual Basic Script. As far as I know, every copy of Windows can interpret Microsoft Visual Basic scripts. Visual Basic scripting is a powerful programming language that can work miracles or destroy your hard work. In this prank, all it does is pop up a harmless message window. VBS by itself isn’t evil. It depends on who the programmer is. So when you use it, be very very careful.

Can you change the message?
Yes, it’s easy to tweak this prank. Here’s a template you can use.

MsgBox “***YourMessage***”, 0, “***MessageBoxTitle***”

You can replace the text ***YourMessage*** with your message. If you want to change the title that displays in the window’s title bar, you can change the text ***MessageBoxTitle***.

Be sure that you keep the quotes.

How can you make people click on it?
Let’s say someone you know uses a shortcut on their desktop to run Internet Explorer. We’ll replace their shortcut with our own prank short cut.

1. Move their shortcut and your joke.vbs file to somewhere in a folder on the PC.

2. On the desktop, create a shortcut to your joke.vbs file.

3. Right click on the joke.vbs shortcut, select “Properties”, and choose the “Change Icon” button.

4. Now select the icon which looks like Internet Explorer.

5. Change the name of the shortcut to “Internet Explorer”.

6. Get ready to laugh at them when they try to go surfing.

If you’d like to learn more about the VB MsgBox function, you can read about it at vbtutor.

Do you have any questions about jokes, pranks or programming? Do you have any ideas you’d like to share? Be sure to add a comment below or email me. I’d love to hear from you.