God Mode and Other Great Hidden Features on Windows 7 and 8!

Windows comes with a great many hidden possibilities. Here are five that everyone should know about.

God Mode

Many people have heard of God Mode in Windows, and imagine it to be some kind of mystical experience. Rather than mystical, though, it is simply convenient. It puts nearly every kind of Windows setting, adjustment and tweak that you may need to access, all in one place.

Firing up God Mode isn't a very intuitive process. You need to type in code to get it going. To begin, you need to create a new folder on your desktop. The folder should be named with a specific string of code: God.ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C(the God. part is only something that helps you name the feature; you can just as easily use any other name ahead of the dot). Right away, the folder's icon will adopt a Control Panel-type form. When you open the folder, it will magically contain hundreds of control items for just about anything that you would like access to on Windows  This trick works on Windows 7 and 8.

The Reliability Monitor

Sometimes, when your system becomes erratic, you need a source of information that tells you what's going on. Windows Reliability Monitor can be great place to turn to. In both Windows 7 and 8, you can type in View reliability history into Windows search to open a special graphical display of your system's stability as Windows measures it, over a few days. You get your computer placed on a scale of 1 to 10 for reliability. The records you see will help you find out if there are specific programs that repeatedly crash and cause stability issues.

The Problem Steps Recorder

Sometimes, a computer can behave in strange ways that could be hard to explain to someone else. If you need a friend who is an expert to look into an issue, the Problem Steps Recorder can be a great way to show them what's happening -- especially if they can't come in for a look.

To fire up Problem Steps Recorder, you simply need to type the word problem intoWindows search . One of the results you come up with should read Record steps to solve a problem . When you select it and run the utility, it will record everything you do, illustrate it with screenshots and include captions to show what you doing, all on its own. It will create a browser-compatible file with the results, zip it up and have it ready for you to email to anyone you need.

Finally, a feature for better security

Practically anyone knows by now that when you delete data on a computer, it doesn't actually get deleted. Rather, it stays on the hard disk. The OS merely has the space occupied by the data marked as open for future rewriting. It can easily be recovered by anyone using file recovery software.

If you have data that you would like to see securely erased, Windows has just the feature: it's called Wipe free disk space .

To use the feature, start Command prompt and type in the following string: /w:C (if it's the C drive that you wish to clean up; if it's another drive, substitute C with the letter name of that drive). When you hit Enter , Windows will automatically look for every scrap of free space on the drive and properly erase it so that there is no recoverable data on it. This feature is available on older versions of Windows, too.

By S0ft Hcks!

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