Even startup pranks are harder in Windows

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on March 9, 2004). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

There used to be a stupid little prank you could play on unsuspecting Mac users (running System 8 or 9 — if I remember correctly, the required utility wasn’t included in previous systems). Normally, when you were done using the computer, you would choose Special > Shutdown… to turn the computer off. However, apparently too many people had difficulties with that, so Apple started including a small utility that lived in the Apple Menu called Shutdown that would…shut down the computer.

So, if you wanted to annoy someone and had a moment at their Mac when their back was turned, you could copy that Shutdown application from the Apple Menu Items folder into the Startup Items folder. Once that was done, every time they started up their computer, as the system went through the Startup Items, it’d find that program, and shut right down again. Simple, and wonderfully annoying.

Tonight, I found a similar prank for Windows XP in Tech TV’s ‘Best Computer Pranks Ever’, and was fairly amused to see how convoluted the process was to get the same result!

To recap — on the Mac:

Open two windows, [System Drive]:System Folder:Apple Menu Items and [System Drive]:System Folder:Startup Items.
Option-drag Shutdown from Apple Menu Items to Startup Items.

On Windows XP…

Right-click the Start menu.

Select Explore Users.

Navigate to Programs > Startup.

Right-click the file windows and select New > Shortcut.

When the window pops up asking for the location, enter “%windir%system32shutdown.exe -r -t 00“.

On the one hand, it’s “only” five steps versus two, and I could have broken the Mac list into three steps (by splitting the first step into two). But even beyond that, there’s that cute little text string that has to be typed in to get the program to execute correctly.

Okay, yeah. So maybe it’s a good thing that — at least in this one instance — it’s harder to annoy someone under Windows XP than under the Classic Mac OS. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t amuse me, though.

iTunes: “Moon Over Greene County” by Zanes, Dan from the album Natural Born Killers (1993, 2:19).