Have Computer Fun

If you're in the mood for instant entertainment, look no further than your computer. No matter what you like to do for fun, you've got endless options. Have computer fun by checking out new games, chatting with your friends, learning something new, exploring computers as a hobby, watching funny videos or even creating your own content to share. As long as your computer works, you'll never have to be bored again.

Steps

Playing Games

  1. Find fun games online. When you're feeling bored, one of the best ways to have some fun is by playing online games.[1]No matter what kind of game you like to play, you'll be able to find something awesome you can play for free.
    • Check out an online database of free games, like:
      • Addicting Games
      • Newgrounds
      • Miniclip
      • PC Gamer
      • ROBLOX
      • FreewareGames
    • If you like immersive RPGs, try playing:
  2. Find the flash versions of classic arcade games. Ever played Asteroids or Centipede? If not, you haven't lived! For quick-loading games, check out Andkon by clicking here or 8Bit.com here. All of the following classic arcade games are available online in free flash versions:
    • Super Mario Bros.
    • Missile Command
    • Contra
    • Donkey Kong
    • Carnage
    • Galaga
    • Pac-Man
    • Tetris
  3. Use Steam to install games on your computer. If you're interested in installing even more games that won't cost you a cent, use the Steam client, available for free at steampowered.com.Install-Steam. Here are just a few of the popular games you can install:
    • Team Fortress 2
    • League of Legends (Separate Client - Not through Steam)
    • War Thunder
    • DOTA 2
  4. Design your own video game. If you're feeling ambitious, you can try designing a simple game yourself with the MIT Scratch site, available by clicking here. Scratch allows you to make a game that you and other people can play. You can talk with other people, play each other's games, and curate studios. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're a gamer.

Watching Videos and Listening to Music

  1. Watch original content on YouTube. YouTube has videos of anything you'd like to see, from silly videos of cats making weird noises to footage of the Apollo Mission. Search for a topic you're into or check out a popular channel and subscribe.[2] The most popular YouTube channels include the following:
    • Pewdiepie — video games and video game commentary
    • HolaSoyGerman — popular Spanish-language comedy
    • Smosh — video game and nerd humor
    • EpicMealTime — outrageously decadent meals
    • CollegeHumor — comedy videos and skits
    • JennaMarbles — popular comedy and commentary
    • Nigahiga — popular comedy and commentary
    • Machinima — video game and movie commentary
    • Markiplier - occasional comedy/musical skit and video game play/commentary
  2. Make your own YouTube video. Want to go viral? A great way to have fun on the computer is making your own videos and putting them online. Here are some video ideas to get you started:
    • Start vlogging.
    • Review your favorite food or drink.
    • Record funny skits with your friends.
    • Rifle through your wallet or your purse and describe what's inside.
    • Do a "haul" video, telling us what you just got at the grocery store, library, or the mall.
    • Teach us a life hack.
  3. Watch movies online. The best sites usually charge for a selection of high quality movies, but you can also find video without shelling out any cash.
    • Pay sites for streaming video include:
      • Netflix
      • Hulu Plus
      • Amazon Prime
      • Vudu
      • iTunes
    • Free streaming sites that are free of spam and other ads include:
      • Hulu
      • YouTube
      • Folkstreams
      • UbuWeb
      • MetaCafe
      • Veoh
      • Vimeo
  4. Listen to music online. Computers changed music forever. From the way it's recorded to the way we listen to it, music and digital technology is as big a part of the music business as guitars nowadays. Some great free or cheap ways to listen to music online include:
    • Pandora Radio
    • Spotify
    • Soundcloud
    • Bandcamp
    • DatPiff
  5. Listen to a podcast. Podcasts are like free radio shows that cover tons of different topics. Check out PodcastOne or PodBay for a wide variety of free podcasts that you can listen to. From pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin to novelist Bret Easton Ellis, it seems like everyone's got a podcast these days.[3] Some of the most popular podcasts include:
    • RadioLab
    • This American Life
    • The Moth
    • The Nerdist
    • Hardcore History
    • Stuff You Should Know
    • Adventure Zone
    • Joe Rogan Experience
    • Savage Lovecast

Finding Random Fun Stuff

  1. Window shop online. Got some time to kill, but no money? Go online shopping, but don't buy anything. You can buy almost anything online, and it can be fun to poke around and price-compare anything from clothes and shoes to land-plots and condominiums. Make a wish list of everything you want. Just don't max out your credit card.
  2. Plan a dream vacation. Use Google Maps to explore cities you're unfamiliar with and explore local landmarks on Wikipedia. Then hop over to Expedia and start pricing plane tickets, or check out AirBnB deals, or advertisements on CouchSurfer. Once you know where you want to go, you can start saving up to make your dream come true.
  3. Visit random websites. A random website service is a website that sends you to random, silly, and interesting places online. You could easily spend countless hours browsing through all of the different links. There are all kinds of random website collections, including:
    • The Useless Web - theuselessweb.com
    • Pointless Sites - pointlesssites.com
    • StumbleUpon - stumbleupon.com
    • Reddit FIR (Funny/Interesting/Random) - reddit.com/r/firwebsites/
  4. Learn a magic trick. Want to impress your friends next time you see them? Try learning a coin or card trick. There are a bunch of places online that break down the steps so that you can learn it at your own speed. One of the most popular sites is GoodTricks (goodtricks.net), but you can also find lots of guides on YouTube.
  5. Make some art online. Feeling a little creative? There are a lot of different online drawing and painting services that range from goofy to professional. Having them online is convenient, since you won't need to install anything yourself. Some popular places include:
    • DoodleToo - doodletoo.com
    • iScribble - iscribble.net
    • Queeky - queeky.com
    • Sketchpad - sketch.io/sketchpad
    • DrawIsland - drawisland.com

Learning and Discovering

  1. Explore Google Earth. Google Earth gives you an up-close look at almost any place you want to see. Using Street View, you can actually explore the streets of Tokyo, or try to find Al Pacino's house. Look up your own house and see if anyone left a window open.
    • If you want to test your geography skills, check out GeoGuessr, which presents you with a random Google Earth street picture and makes you guess where in the world it is. The closer your guess, the more points you get.[4]
  2. Read some listicles. Want to see a list of the 25 Best Sandwiches in the World in .gifs? How about the top 20 toys kids loved in the 90s? Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Slate, The Awl, and other sites all have hilarious and interesting lists of random things you didn't know you cared about. Check them out for a great way to kill a little time and not think too hard.
  1. Read the local news online. For news that matters to you, find your local news source online and read up on the stories that matter most to you. Increasingly, people engage with their local news sources less and less, which means the average Internet user knows more about what's going on in the lives of celebrities than in their own local government. Use the Internet to learn about where you live.
  2. Take a free online course. Develop skills and better yourself while you're having fun. Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are free and easy to find. It's like sitting in the hallowed halls of Harvard, but in the comfort of your own home. Look for MOOCs by searching a database like this one.
  3. Read culture or specialty blogs. Whatever you're interested in, there's probably a whole online community of others who love it, too. Like gaming? Check out PC Gamer or IGN to learn about the latest games. Music fan? Check out Pitchfork, Aquarium Drunkard, or Brooklyn Vegan. Do some poking around and find a community with like-minded interests that you can engage with, or at least explore.
  4. Travel back through internet-time. If you're curious about what the internet looked like 10 or 15 years back, there's a handy way to travel back through time. The Internet Archive has built a tool that let's you access old versions of websites.
  5. Use a Wiki. If you're already here, you might as well join up and start contributing! Wikis like wikiHow and wikipedia can only survive with user-generated content and users who are willing to perform all kinds of essential tasks that keep the site up and running. From patrolling recent changes to starting whole new articles, contributing to a wiki can be a rewarding and fun activity.

Using Social Networking

  1. Chat with your friends. Yeah, yeah, you already thought of this, but maybe there's a new way to chat you haven't tried. Look at UberFacts[5] and see who can come up with the most random fact to talk about. Share links, pictures, and videos that will make your friends laugh.
    • Facebook, Skype, Kik Messenger, and Google Mail are probably the most common chatting services, but Yahoo, AOL, other email-service chat generators are also available for old-fashioned IMs.
    • If you're feeling lonely, try video chatting with your friends. It can help to make it feel like you're actually hanging out. Just don't video chat with people you don't know well. Message and old friend and get together on Facebook video chat or Skype.
  2. Use Facebook or open a Facebook account. Facebook is a great way to kill some time. You can upload content, check out other people's updates, and talk to your friends instantly. It's a great way to get in touch and have fun on the computer.
    • If you're bored with your Feed, do some deep digging into someone you don't know. Your best friend's second cousin's girlfriend's Facebook page probably has a bunch of stuff on it you've never seen. Check out vacation pictures from ten years ago.
    • Or you could add some content. Studies show that people who spend more time looking at other people's content and less time adding their own are more depressed and bored than people who do.[6] Update your status, add some pictures, and write on other peoples' walls.
  3. Compose some Tweets. Make a Twitter account and start following celebrities, your friends, and other interesting Tweeters to get engaging in the hashtag community, if you haven't already. If you can be witty, concise, and engaging, you can build up some followers and entertain them with ridiculous Tweets on a daily basis. Then start a Twitter beef with Steve Inskeep from NPR, or Nicki Minaj. Kidding. Don't do that.
  4. Review stuff on Yelp. Have you ever been to a restaurant and had an opinion about it? Of course you have. Might as well put it online right? In all seriousness, offering consumer criticism is a great way of killing some time online and having fun. Let your voice be heard.
  5. Pin some cool finds on Pinterest. Pinterest is a great way of exploring recipes, fun facts, clothes, and other lifestyle hacks, as well of sharing your great finds with others. It's easy to glance through quickly, making it a great resource if you're having trouble thinking of something fun to do online. Start a page and get pinning!
  6. Know if a Message Board is Good to Join. Without message boards, we never would have gotten the concept of the meme, the "lulz," or the well-placed .gif. Message boards can be tough to crack into, but big communities exist around every type of subculture, from punk rock to skating to anime to video games. Find a good message board related to your interests, start and account, and chat safely.

Having Fun Without the Internet

  1. Change your screensaver and desktop. Feeling bored? Give your computer a makeover. Computer savvy people call it a desktop theme. You can begin by clicking on My Computer and then Control Panel on a PC, or selecting System Preferences on a Mac. In making over your computer alone, there are loads of things to do:
    • The appearance and colors of your computer
    • The sounds on your computer
    • Your mouse icon
    • Your display settings
  2. Change your background. Surf Google Images or proper wallpaper sites, and get an awesome-looking wallpaper for your computer. Sharks wearing birthday hats? Sweet. Be creative-get a pretty shot of your favorite celebrity, a cool pattern, or a nice picture of your favorite magazine or brand.
  3. Change your screensaver. Scroll through your pictures and pick a new screensaver, or download one. You could always go with a slideshow of all your pictures (meh) or one that makes it look like the Matrix (sweet).
  4. Turn the screen upside down. On a PC and Mac hit the combination CTRL-ALT-DOWN.
  5. Listen to music. Have fun on the computer by listening to music and digging around your playlists. Make a fresh playlist or mix of songs that would be fun to dance to, to meditate to, or do work out to, and spend way too much time organizing it. Turn your iTunes on random to shuffle all your songs into a strange order and try to guess what's being played. Turn on the iTunes or Windows Media Player visualizer function to give yourself something to stare at while you zone out. Or, you know, just listen to the good stuff.
  6. Take some pictures. If you've got a webcam installed, mess around taking selfies, setting up weird still-life pictures in front of your computer, or just goofing with the picture filters on your computer. Make yourself look like a bent-up alien with a weird nose, or mess with the colors until you look seasick.
  7. Photoshop some pictures. If you've got Photoshop installed, cut up pictures and make weird meme-worthy new ones. Your grandmother's face on Stallone's body? Good start.
  8. Keep a digital diary. Back in the dark ages (like the 1970s), people used to actually keep things called diaries, in which they wrote about their life, eloquently and with detailed writing. Shocker, right? It's actually a great way of spending a couple hours on your computer, especially if you can't get online. Open up a word-processing file and just start writing about your day. Keep a running log. Who knows, you might like it so much that you could transition it into making a blog somewhere down the road.
  9. Record a song. Most newer models of computers have built-in internal microphones and software installed that will allow you to record a song (or sounds at least) onto your computer and start manipulating it in minutes. You don't have to be super-talented, or even have an instrument on hand to record music. Just record yourself humming, then turn up the distortion on the settings and listen to the wild sounds you can make. Layer yourself reading random passages from the Bible, then another track of your doc snoring. Avant-garde masterpiece.
    • Record a podcast of yourself like an old school DJ, talking about your favorite songs in between each track in the playlist. Pick songs with a theme and make a playlist, then record a vocal track of chatting in between. Do it with a friend for extra fun.
    • Edit other songs together, changing the settings on a Bob Dylan track to make it sound like death metal, or messing around with death metal to make it sound like ambient drone music. Slowing down tracks by 700% even became a meme recently, from dial-up sounds to Nickelback songs.[7]

Exploring Computers as a Hobby

  1. Learn to write code. If you're tired of the "typical" ways of having fun on your computer, why not take your passion to the next level? Learning how to code allows you design and write your own computer programs from the ground up. It's a little like learning a new language and can be a bit of a challenge, but it can be seriously rewarding (plus, it looks great on your resume.)[8]
    • There are a lot of different programming languages out there. Though there's no "right" way to learn to program, here are five languages frequently recommended for beginners:[9]
      • Python
      • C/C++
      • Java
      • Javascript
      • Ruby
    • Check out CodeAcademy.com for free interactive coding tutorials in a number of programming languages.
  2. Learn web design. Do you find yourself spending tons of time online? If so, consider learning the basics of web design so that you can create your own sites and give back to the online community! Some basic web design skills overlap with the list of basic programming languages above (for instance, many sites use Javascript.) On the other hand, skills like HTML coding offer the chance to learn web-centric programming.
    • Here's just a short list of sites that offer web design training courses for free:
  3. Explore new operating systems. Did you know that you don't necessarily have to use the operating system your computer came with? It's true — Mac computers can run Windows OSs, PCs can run Mac OSs, and both can run free user-created OSs! Getting this set up can be a little tricky, so consult the support page of the program you use (or brows our help articles) if you run into problems.
    • To run Windows on a Mac, use:
      • Boot Camp (comes pre-installed or available for free download)
      • A Parallels program, like Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac
    • To run Install Mac OS X 10 3 (Panther) on Your Windows PC, use:
      • A bootable USB drive[14]
      • A virtualization program like Virtualbox[15]
    • Also consider alternatives like Linux, Ubuntu and Haiku - free OSs that work on both Mac and Windows!
  4. Customize your computer. If you can't get the performance you want out of your computer the way it is, consider opening it up and changing your physical hardware. Depending on what you intend to do, this can actually be surprisingly easy. However, since it's easy to damage the fragile components inside a computer, it's important only to try this if you know what you're doing.
    • Here are some components that can be modified or replaced to increase a computer's performance:
      • Graphics card
      • Sound card (This will not increase performance although it can increase sound quality)
      • Fan/cooling system
      • RAM
      • Processor/CPU
      • Also cleaning out all the dust in a computer can speed it up, but be careful to be grounded as for static electricity can ruin a computer!
    • If you're feeling especially ambitious, try making computer maintenance a hobby. Some people like to take apart and rebuild their computers for fun — just like people who enjoy tooling around on cars. Best of all, this practical know-how will give you a natural knowledge of the inside of a computer that most people can only dream of.

Tips

  • If you are a creative person and you like clothes then click on to Polyvore where you click on create and you can put your favourite clothes together. If you like animation then sign up to go animate. It's completely free and is a good laugh.
  • If all else fails, just search for fun software on Google and see if you can find anything fun to mess about on.
  • If you get bored of any of the items on this list, try something different!
  • If you have kids that use your computer, look at their history. Sometimes it makes for a good laugh!
  • Try some kid's websites! Some of them may actually be pretty fun.

Warnings

  • Be careful when looking for freeware games on unfamiliar websites. Some "free" games are infected with viruses and/or malware. If in doubt, always research the site's public reputation (Wikipedia often has articles about websites and dangerous software), or restrict yourself to only "open source" games.
  • Remember that not all the information you find on the Internet is reliable. Books are just a tad bit safer!

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/05/30/the-best-free-online-games-on-pc/
  2. ↑ http://socialblade.com/youtube/top/100/mostsubscribed
  3. ↑ http://podcastone.com
  4. ↑ https://geoguessr.com
  5. ↑ http://uber-facts.com
  6. ↑ http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy
  7. ↑ http://gizmodo.com/5816392/a-modem-dial-up-sound-slowed-down-700-is-pure-creepfest
  8. ↑ http://readwrite.com/2013/04/09/15-programming-skills-most-coveted-by-employers
  9. ↑ http://lifehacker.com/five-best-programming-languages-for-first-time-learners-1494256243
  10. ↑ http://www.geekchamp.com/html5-tutorials/1-html5-overview
  11. ↑ https://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/beginners
  12. ↑ http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/html/
  13. ↑ http://learn.shayhowe.com/
  14. ↑ http://www.tonymacx86.com/445-unibeast-install-os-x-yosemite-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html
  15. ↑ http://lifehacker.com/5938332/how-to-run-mac-os-x-on-any-windows-pc-using-virtualbox
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