About the author

J Sawyer is a developer based in Houston, TX who absolutely loves to write code. After spending 9 years at Microsoft, he moved on to other things and is currently the Lead Developer for the RealTime Data Management team at Logica US. He spends his days building Really Cool Things around StreamInsight and having a blast doing it.

He has been involved with HDNUG, one of the oldest and largest .NET-focused user groups in the US, since its inception in 2001 and has watched it grow from 5-10 technologists meeting around a conference table to a thriving community of over 5000 with regular meeting attendance averaging 100 attendees. He currently serves as the Vice President. You can join him at HDNUG on the second Thursday of every month at the Houston Microsoft office.

He also loves to ride his Yamaha FZ1. And sometimes his Ninja 650. And also his Honday XR-400 dirt bike. But he doesn't code and ride at the same time. That would be bad.

“God Mode” in Windows 7

January 14, 2010 10:26 PM

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I see “God Mode”, I think of running around in some shooter killing all the bad guys/monsters/aliens/whatever without any worry of damage or harm coming to me. Those of you that cut your teeth on some of the old school DOS-based games of yester-century (a la Doom) will know exactly what I’m talking about.

I don’t think of “God Mode” when it comes to an operating system. Unless, perhaps, running everything as admin. Really, though, that’s probably more akin to anti-God Mode if you think about it; you need to be a little more worried about potential damage and hazards since you are running as admin.

But then there’s Windows 7 and we have things like User Account Control to keep you from doing too much harm. So is “God Mode” some super-anti-UAC thingie that makes it like it was in the old days when you could call deltree from the root of your C: drive and it would happily go about doing it? (Note: Yes, I know someone that did this. No, it wasn’t me. And no, I don’t recommend trying it.)

Nope, not at all like the God Mode that I knew and loved from the days of Doom.

So when I saw an article called “Understanding Windows 7's 'GodMode'”, I was intrigued. It’s not the “God Mode” of Doom-yore, but it is interesting nonetheless and I’m kinda liking it. You create a folder and name it “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” (no quotes, of course). Then … behold! the icon changes and you have access to a ton of controls and settings for the operating system. It does work on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, which is what I’m running right now.

It reminds me, in a way, of the Windows 95 Product Team Easter Egg. But simpler to create and a lot more useful.

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Idle Babbling

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