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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Windows 7 Easter Egg - "God Mode"

Windows 7 is out in dead earnest - and the Easter Egg Hunt has begun!



For those who may not be familiar with the term, an "Easter Egg" (within the context of a piece of software, or a game), is a "hidden" feature or capability that can only be accessed by knowing some (supposedly) secret command that unlocks the feature.  Most previous versions of Windows have had some kind of "Easter egg" or another - ranging from clever tricks to silly animations.

In some cases, Easter Eggs are clever "short-cut" features that are used during in-house development and testing to speed the development process - or make the developers / testers lives easier.  They might even be seperate "special" apps - that let the development teams do something clever and convenient.



I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that a lot of the previous Windows Power Toys were just this kind of thing - Easter-egg kinds of links, or special clever helper apps - that eventually went main-stream.

The "new" God Mode in Windows 7 is just this kind of thing - it's a way to collapse all the features within Windows 7's various control panel features into one convenient folder.

Accessing this special "God Mode" is easy:
  • Create a new folder somewhere.
  • Change the name to GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Once you do that the folder's icon will change into something like a control-panel and it will - automagically - contain dozens of icons to various system controls.



Note:  This information was originally posted on the CNET column "Beyond Binary" by Ina Fried (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10423985-56.html) on Jan 4th, 2010.

1 comment:

  1. oh really???? I had never heard of the term "Easter Egg" and I think well I thought I knew a lot about computers, but you know you always learn something new, I will follow your steps and try that to see those mysterious icons, thanks pal!

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