Hehe, neat! I remember doing something similar, albeit once accidentally. Instead of changing the shell (e.g. to LiteStep), I forced an old DOS game to be executed before windows. Exiting the game would result in shutting down the PC.

I was terrified that I removed my OS and replaced it with a shareware point and click adventure game.

It was a great learning experience though (esp. for my German: https://moorhuhn.fandom.com/de/wiki/Dunkle_Schatten)

I remember running Winamp in the background along with various games (Diablo, Age of Empires, Red Alert). They would always lag terribly.. but not if you didn't log in first!

win+R before login was pretty useful - albeit insecure!

Happy times. With single-digit RAM, every megabyte counts!

Tangential, but I installed Longhorn on a high school computer without considering the implications. I saw another student casually using it a few weeks later like it was nothing special. Out of morbid curiosity, I would have loved to see the technician who came to fix it.

Wonderful to see Longhorn mentioned. This defined my middle school tinkering days, and eventually got me into other OSes like Linux.

This is so meta! In all that time, SC (1&2) to this day continues to evolve the metagame around efficient build orders: what can I do to throw a punch at my opponent sooner than they can expect. If we could start our matches from the BIOS POST rather than the in-game 0:00, I guess you'd have a pretty strong timing push ;)