Windows 7 Has Lots of "God Modes"

An anonymous reader writes "Those intrigued by the 'GodMode' in Windows 7 may be interested to know that there are many other similar shortcuts hidden within the operating system — some going back to Vista or before. Steven Sinofsky, Windows division president, said several similar undocumented features provide direct access to all kinds of settings, from choosing a location to managing power settings to identifying biometric sensors." Update: 01/07 23:46 GMT by CT : Link updated to source.

Comments

Direct Copy article

[furby076]

1) The article is a copy/paste of the cnet article (kind of a fail for aviran's place).
2) More importantly, from the article, I inferred these god mode settings were just (basically) command lines to initiate control panel activities? Not a big deal if that is the case. It is shortcuts of a way I guess. Or is there something more to this?

Re:Those strings can't be right

[EvilRemix]

There is only one God mode and it is IDDQD.

I don't get it....

[cptdondo]

If all of the features are in the Control Panel, why do the developers need shortcuts?

In other words, what's wrong with the Control Panel interface that hinders developers to the point where they have to hack in these types of kludges?

And, yes, I consider a directory with a "special string" a horrible kludge. Think of all the behind-the-scenes complications that this brings on. Every directory creation/access has to be checked for these modes. How does a godmode directory interact with a random app?

The mind reels.

Re:I don't get it....

[ceoyoyo]

"In other words, what's wrong with the Control Panel interface that hinders developers to the point where they have to hack in these types of kludges?"

You don't use Windows, hey?

My thought when I read the article was similar. If your developers are making themselves obscure shortcuts, you might want to have your UI team rethink their design.

Re:I don't get it....

[Sir_Sri]

well that's why they're developers, not users. Your developers need to see stuff in the OS on a more regular basis than the average user. Finding connected hardware ID strings, even as a guy getting a PhD in computer science isn't exactly top of my priority list. If you look at the godmode everyone was playing with it's not exactly insightful. It's just a list, sorted alphabetically by type of task, of menus. Useful if you're changing stuff for the sake of changing stuff (say the first time you set up your computer or if you're testing), but there's no obvious logical connection between my folder display settings, my windows defender settings and my 'location and other sensors' options. It's handy to have if you want to see a list of a lot of stuff you can do, but not really very functional.

If anything they don't really belong together unless you're doing stuff with the operating system that is very different than your average user, like say, trying to test the functionality of all this stuff, in order.

Admittedly control panel isn't a great implementation, I think MS is still grappling with which direction to take your system settings, either the sort of godmode exhaustive list, which IMO is far too confusing for the average user (albeit alphabetical at least), and the task dependent options where you only see your folders settings options if you're messing with folders, mouse settings with mouse software etc. In the end they've settled on an ugly hybrid of the two, but I think that covers all bases better than the alternatives.

Re:Unfortunately...

[recoiledsnake]

God bless their souls. I would want Grandma to be atleast 3 clicks away from the desktop from settings such as "Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions". Me? I just put the folder on the desktop as a easy way to tweak my gaming desktop.