Windows 7’s ‘God-Mode’. As useful as IDDQD?

I recently stumbled across a link to enable an easter egg on Windows 7, interestingly called “God Mode”. You can read more about it here but essentially it’s just a special folder that contains ALL the options that is available from the Control Panel, all 279 of them (at least on my machine).

Too lazy to check out the site to get this yourself, well, it’s really simple.

Go create a new folder and name it exactly this: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Actually, the important part is the GUID bit (those long gibberish string of alphanumeric characters). So if you like this God-mode folder to be called, AlphaOmega, well, just name it as AlphaOmega.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} then. That’s it!

If you’re familiar with Windows 7 or Vista, you’d know that the Control Panel is a major revamp from the previous ones in Windows XP. This time round, the requires the use of Windows search to fully unleash the usability of the control panel. If you’d ask me, I’d say that this is perhaps the best feature of Windows ever since Microsoft released DOS 6.22. Oh wait, DOS 6.22 is not Windows. But then again, I was always tempted to deltree my c:/win311 directory. LOL!

Ok back to topic!

So, what’s the big deal with this hidden God-mode feature? If you take a look at the following screenshot below, you’re not missing much at all.

At first, you might wonder which idiot at Redmond decided NOT to include this feature in the first place. But once you get over the I-just-love-to-bash-Microsoft-anyway mode (I know it’s not easy!), you’d realise that with 279 items cluttering the God-mode panel, it’s hardly productive at all.

And with 279 items to browse through, you would most probably end up using the folder search feature anyway. So, what’s the point of this God-mode panel then?

But hey, aren’t there any hidden settings available in this God-mode panel? Apparently, according to this blog here, there’s none that would make you as rich as Bill Gates. Yeah, I’m disappointed too. Not even a hint of “Email this to everyone and you’ll get a new notebook!” note too. Sigh!

I did do a quick check myself and it’s true, you can find everything in this panel if you use the search bar. So why bother?

And here’s why you shouldn’t even bother with this God-mode panel. Let me share with you why I mentioned earlier in this post that the Windows7 and Vista’s search capability is the best thing that came out of Redmond since….forever.

Did you know that you don’t even need to open the Control Panel to get what you want directly? You can just hit the Start button and type in say “password” into the search bar and voila, a list of Control Panel tasks related to passwords appears on the start bar. Cool ain’t it!