A rather silly “trick” ( and really that’s all it is, has been making headlines over the last few days. From what I can tell it was really brought to the forefront by Ina Fried from CNET who says:
“By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard drive partition.”
So somebody decided to call this “God Mode” because to enable this “trick” you make a folder called GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and double-click on it. What you end up with is… drum roll… the control panel; it’s just in a different view than you’d normally see.
First of all, the text ”GodMode” has nothing to do with making the trick work. You can call the folder “IFreakinRawk.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” and now you’ve discovered the magical “IFreakinRawk” feature hidden in Windows.
In reality all you have discovered is:
A documented feature of the shell. Folders can be easily made into ‘namespace junctions’. The whole thing is described on MSDN. Basically, any folder named <DisplayName>.<CLSID> will show up with just the <DisplayName> portion visible in Explorer, and navigating into the folder will take you to the namespace root defined by the <CLSID> portion of the name. This isn’t for USERS, it’s really more of a developer feature.
The second thing is that it’s really the “All Tasks” folder. This is a special shell folder which is used as the source of the “Control Panel” search results seen in the Start menu. This folder was not designed to be browsed to directly, as the normal Control Panel folder (accessible via Start -> Control Panel) contains all the same items but with a custom view designed to be easier to navigate. The “All Tasks” folder has no custom view, so you just see the standard Explorer list view and little else.
The existence of this folder and its CLSID are implementation details and should not be relied upon by anybody for any purpose.
Your IT snobbery has missed the point. Regardless of whether YOU believe it’s “god-like” it is a neat “trick” that many users, even power-users…just non-developers, may find useful.
I know few…well no one actually, who visit MSDN on a regular basis and carefully read all the articles. Let alone 99.999% of all Windows users. So, let the people believe they are “gods”. It does no harm.
RE: cobra’s response
I think anyone that would actually take advantage of even HALF of the things listed in “God Mode” would already either know how to do this from having read the MSDN article or TechNet article, or would know how to accomplish the things listed in “God Mode” by other means.
While I’m sure that there may be a small few people that have never heard of this or think it’s cool, or whatever, I think it’s a waste of time. First, who the hell is gonna remember 1 week or more down the road that they even created a folder on the root of their C:\ drive called “God Mode” or whatever they chose to call it? Second, how many times can you or anyone honestly say that they’ve EVER needed to get into 99% of the areas that are listed in “God Mode”?
I can’t begin to think of how many times I’ve “Stumbled” onto an article about this same topic. It’s become extremely annoying. My opinion, to sum it all up, is that instead of calling it “God Mode” people should be calling it “I-don’t-know-how-to-do-anything-useful-on-a-computer-so-I-made-this-folder-to-make-it-at-least-appear-like-I-do Mode”.