Make your own error messages

Have you ever wanted to screw with a co-worker or friend? Okay, let me rephrase that. This site is for when you want to screw with a co-worker or friend. It's a website that allows you to enter information for the title bar, window text, and buttons, and it generates an image that you can then download - like the example above. Unfortunately, the dialog boxes that it generates aren't accurate enough to fool anyone that knows Windows even reasonably well.

Speaking about error messages, here's a funny story I found on the internet:

"This is probably the best ever practical joke I played on a friend. A buddy of mine that I went to school with was "the source" - he was the guy that hung out in IRC rooms and newsgroups and managed to get all the latest cracked software. Of course, I'd never recommend running cracked software, but this was a simpler stupider time. He was also the guy that enjoyed finding all the latest "hacking" scripts, and running them against his friends. If I had a dollar for every time he remotely bluescreened my Win98 box, I'd probably have about $30. Still, it was annoying.

Anyhow, this friend's claim to fame was that he hadn't paid for any software on his system, including Windows. One day when I was visiting him, I waited until he went out for a smoke, and I slipped a floppy into his drive with a simple .reg file on it. Then I quickly double clicked the .reg file, clicked OK, and stuffed my floppy back in my pocket.

The .reg file was a simple registry entry that added a dialog box during logon to Windows - he was running NT Server if I remember correctly. My dialog box popped up with the following:
Title: Illicit Software Alert
Body: Illegal software has been detected on this system. Press OK to remove.

Now the great thing about Windows logon dialogs is that you only get one button: the OK button.

My buddy literally fell off his chair backwards. He was terrified. He couldn't bring himself to click OK, and he couldn't get into Windows without doing so. I wish I'd been better able to contain my laughter, because it didn't take him long to figure out that he was being had."

For all of you that spent some time to read the joke. Here's some information about the registry entry you'll want to mess with in order to try this trick on your friends

[Start] [Run] [Regedit] Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Modify/Create the Value Name [LegalNoticeCaption] according to the Value Data listed below. Data Type: REG_SZ [String Value] // Value Name: LegalNoticeCaption Value Data for LegalNoticeCaption: [Type the Caption for the Dialog Box] Modify/Create the Value Name [LegalNoticeText] according to the Value Data listed below. Data Type: REG_SZ [String Value] // Value Name: LegalNoticeText Value Data for LegalNoticeText: [Type the Data for the Legal Notice] Exit Registry and Reboot