Terrify your friends with Windows Error Message Creator

You're busy working on your PC. Everything seems fine. But then, without warning, an error message tells you that some irreplaceable files have been lost forever.

It's horrible. A nightmare. But if you're the twisted type then you can now bring this experience to your friends, with a little help from Windows Error Message Creator (WEMC).

The program is a tiny portable tool which you can unzip to a USB stick. If a friend leaves their PC or laptop unattended for a moment, run WEMC on their system, and in a second or two you can have it displaying a fake BSOD, a "Formatting…" dialog or some other custom alert with the text and graphics of your choice.

There's no real BSOD, formatting or anything else involved, of course. WEMC just displays a custom alert of your choice: that's all. This doesn't have to be cruel, either – you can wish someone happy birthday, ask "Will you marry me?", whatever you like,

Whatever your intention, WEMC gives plenty of control over the dialog box design. On its main screen, you're able to choose the dialog box type (Question/ Information/ Exclamation/Critical/Custom), set your own title and one or two custom lines of text, enable up to three buttons with your own text for each, and select a suitable preset icon ("Locked", "Warning", "Low Battery", etc.) or define your own.

The Create menu has further options to build a "Format" dialog -- something which sort-of looks like it’s wiping your chosen drive (it’s static, the progress bar doesn't more) -- or leave the system displaying a Blue Screen of Death which hides everything else and doesn't go away until the user presses Enter.

What you can't do is automate any of this. There are no command line switches to display messages from a script, say -- you have to manually enter the details each time, which might be a problem if you don't know how long you'll have at a PC. (ZenMsg is a command line equivalent, if you'd prefer that.)

You should probably think about how your target might react, too. If they think all their work has been lost to a BSOD, is it possible they’ll turn off or restart the computer, losing their work for real, before you've a chance to explain?

Still, if you're cruel, heartless, and/or filming the whole thing secretly to put on YouTube, there's no doubt Windows Error Message Creator gives you plenty of scope for scaring people. Just don't be surprised if it takes them a while to see the funny side.