Write a script to create an neverending amount of files. Piratinh games. Trick teachers into giving us their passwords. I could go on...

I used to goto cartoon websites and play unallowed computer games, nothing inappropriate, just spongbob stuff, which got me permanently banned from watching spongbob at home.

The school would keep using Internet Explore 6, I'd update it to iE 8. They didn't like that.

I'd also would install some toolbars, there was this one yahoo one, that added tabbed browsing to iE6. :)

Updating to iE8 on only one older computer caused problems, but the newer machines worked fine with iE8. ;)

I would install Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Apple's Safari for Windows web browsers. I enjoyed testing and find the best browsers back then.... Staff weren't to happy though.

I'd change desktop wallpaper to windows XP's Bliss, instead of the schools preset solid colour background.

As i got older, I learned how to write batch and vbs scripts to automate different things, so i wrote a tool to automatically login to some of my required school accounts, without me needing to manually type in my login credentials each time. Staff either didn't know or didn't mind this.

We never had school computers :(

We installed Doom on a couple computers, this was in '97. Our computer teacher had absolutely no idea how we did it. Private schools were fun for running circles around the teachers.

So many comments are about such major things, where as at most I only really put ThePowderToy into the shared drive for student accounts in my junior year of highschool and once in my freshman year made a simple batch program that all it did was constantly open up command prompts but didn't do anything harmful.

Y'all did so much more interesting and worse things than I did, I swear

I used them as a sort of thin client into a system that I had root on, so I could do whatever Science demanded of me without asking for access. Permitted, but certainly unexpected!

I would carry a USB stick that just had a VNC client on it. My home server was built from high-end scrap, and was leagues faster than anything the department had at the time, at least for student use.

I also had a Sharp Zaurus I had jury-rigged WiFi into, so I could run data analysis whenever I thought of something. It ran VNC or SSH. This was in the early days before it was called "machine learning" or even "big data". So we take this sort of thing for granted now (hello Google Cloud), but at the time it was magic superpowers to have immediate access to a machine with 4 physical CPUs from a handheld device.



Netbus 1.70 baby

We could unscrew the chassis of the computer and take whatever hardware we wanted to lol. We never actually got anything but we'd remove the RAM or unplug a hard drive and put it back.

We also found games hidden in certain directories. I even saw someone playing Undertale.

I also found a torrent client running on start up on one of the desktops seeding some movies.

If it counts, we used a program to throttle other devices' WiFi speeds. I forgot what it was called.

Installed ventoy to a 32gb flash drive, turned off secure boot and then load into any distro on the drive

Also had a persistent windows installation on another drive

Set up fork bombs to trigger at random intervals.

Install NixOS on them 😈

All of the other people here have such cool stories to share, while I am here, who just changed the default browser of a few computers...