I haven’t published new articles under the Fun with your PC category for a while, so it’s time to revisit the fun side of PCs (not counting gaming of course).

Here is a new prank that you can play on your friends, family or even enemies, provided you can access their PC. It involves installing a screen saver that simulates the Blue Screen of Death. This small file is actually offered by Microsoft, and you can download it here.

You just have to access your victims’ computers and install a small 700kb file and activate it (extract the file from the zip folder to the Windows directory. Then go to Display Properties and select SysInternalsBluescreen from the list of screen savers). The screen will appear when the user least expects it (you will set the timer) and they will think the PC crashed. Perhaps they’ll even be forced to restart the PC. However, they’ll be very surprised when the same message appears again the next time the screen saver is activated. It will take them a few times to ‘get’ what’s happening.

For everyone who doesn’t know what Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is: either you are extremely lucky, or you just started using a PC, in which case you are likely to see it one day, or you have seen it but don’t know what it was. BSOD appears when the computer crashes due to hardware or software failure and it throws a huge error message, with white text on blue background – hence the name “Blue Screen”. The user is notified that the computer experienced an error and it cannot function, so it just ‘freezes’ – hence the name “Death”.

The PC can usually be repaired, but in rare cases it literally means death, because you have lost important data and/or you have to replace expensive parts to fix it.

This file works on Win NT/98/2k/XP. I haven’t had a chance to test it on Win Vista and 7, but I imagine it would work there too.