Mark Minasi's Windows Networking Tech Page
Issue #83 January 2010

What's Inside

News
- Join Me at a Seminar!
Tech Section
- Using Windows' "God Mode" Console
Conferences
To Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Read Old Newsletters or Change Your Email Address

News

Hi all —

Happy new year! And with the new year comes the discovery of an undocumented-but-useful Windows feature that folks are calling the "god mode" console. Sound a bit hyped? Well, with that name, it is -- but it's still worth understanding. Consider it a late Christmas present from Microsoft and I'll tell you all about it but first, a word from our sponsor:

Two-Day Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Classes: Dallas March 22/24 2010, and Charlotte NC March 30-April 1

My new two-day Windows 7 desktop support class and my two-day Server 2008 R2 support class are coming to Dallas and March and Charlotte in late March. Why attend? Well...

Windows 7, Microsoft's new desktop OS, and Server 2008 R2, the new server OS, arrived last October 22, and so now we've all got to answer the question, "to upgrade or not?" It's not an easy question, as Win 7/R2 -- like all new OSes -- are a mixed bag of pluses and minuses, and sorting through all of that can take a lot of time... which is how my courses and I may be of assistance. As I've done throughout the past 26 years whenever a new OS appears, I've created an easy-to-understand, in-depth guide to what you'll like and what you might hate about the latest Windows. Oh, but wait, I forgot the two most important other reasons to attend my courses. First, I'm independent. I don't work for Microsoft, I don't sell software, and I won't make a dime if you upgrade. Second, I discovered something a long time ago: this stuff can be deathly boring. I love talking about tech, but it can have its boring aspects and even the smartest tech companies do some of the dumbest stuff, so there's always lots to get a giggle out of, as you'll see if you join me for a class.

The first new seminar, Windows 7 for Support Professionals, gets you up to speed quickly on everything new on the Win 7 desktop — deployment changes, new admin tools, brand-new security and networking features, and so on. If, on the other hand, your focus is on server software, then our second new class, Installing, Managing and Troubleshooting Windows Server 2008 R2, does the same thing for server software, including a special focus on new Active Directory capabilities.

Attend Both Seminars: Save A Day and $200

But what if both new operating systems are of interest to you? Then I can save you some money and time because I discovered as I researched these classes that there was a lot of new information that applied both to the desktop and the server OSes, and so I've arranged them so that the second day of the desktop class is also the first day of the server class — for example, "booting from virtual disks" is a nice new feature that applies both to desktops and servers, and BranchCache is a useful branch office technology that's of no value without configuring both clients and servers, and so both technologies fit well in the middle of the three days. Thus, you can attend both two-day classes in just three days total, and the per-day cost of attending the third day is 40% cheaper than the first two days. Whether you're interested in the Windows 7 class, the Server 2008 R2 class or both, you can attend them at either of these locations:

Dallas 22-24 March
Charlotte 30 March-1 April

We've got the Windows 7 outline at http://www.minasi.com/win7class/, the Server 2008 R2 outline at http://www.minasi.com/08r2class/, and the schedule of classes and links to register at http://www.minasi.com/pubsems.htm. I hope you can join me for one of these seminars, as there's lots to learn about Win 7 and R2.

And don't forget that I can bring either or both classes to your site and, if you skipped Vista/2008, can add whatever other info you need to get completely up to speed; to find out more, email my assistant Merilyn Foell at Assistant@Minasi.com, or call her at (757) 426-1431 (only between 12-5 Eastern time, weekdays, please).

Tech Section: Playing with the "God Mode" Easter Egg

A few days into the new year, word arrived about an interesting and newly-discovered Easter Egg in Windows 7 and 32-bit Vista that folks have named the "God Mode console" or "GMC." God mode? It's touted as a windows app that many bloggers have described as a single, does-it-all window to let you control everything about your computer and, with a bit of a stretch, one could call it that -- although you'd probably have to do Pilates every day before you could safely execute that stretch.

More accurately, however, GMC is simply an Explorer window containing a single all-in-one-place listing of all control panel pages. Even that, however, can be quite useful, as you can see from this screen shot.

In this picture, you can see a couple of things about the GMC. First of all, is just a folder (albeit a special one, as we'll see), viewed with Explorer. Here, I've arranged the window so that the portion you can see -- there are zillions of Control Panel settings, so there's no way I could show you the whole thing -- displays the items in the Network and Sharing Center. Now, one of the places that I use the most in the Network and Sharing Center is the "View network connections" page. It's the place where you get a list of all of your NICs, where you can bring up their network properties, re-order network bindings (a once-again valuable tool in a world where we'll soon all be doing both IPv4 and IPv6), and the like. Normally it takes a few clicks to get to the "View network connections" page, but from the GMC, it's just one click so hey, that ain't bad. What the GMC does not do, however, is show any "hidden" or "secret" features, as some Web pages have claimed. (Of course, the fastest way to get there is to just click Start and then type "ncpa.cpl" in the "Search programs and files" field, then press Enter.)

So how to get a GMC of your own? Simple.

First, create a new folder. You can do it anywhere on your computer -- any drive, second-level folders, you name it.

Second, name it anything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} where anything can be, well, anything, any text. Every Web page I've seen so far says that the anything text must be the phrase "godmode" but a look at my screen shot above shows that I named mine Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and it works just fine.

Now open up the folder, and voila, you've got a GMC. But that's not all that you can do with it; I was sort of surprised to find that

Deleting it can be a problem. In some experiments, I've been unable to delete the folder, and get an error that the folder's in use elsewhere, no matter how careful I am to shut down other Explorer and Control Panel windows. In those cases, just rebooting let me delete the GMC folder.
You can do it on either an NTFS or FAT32 drive.
You can put it on a removable drive and carry it around. Whether on a CF card, a USB stick, or an SDHC card, a GMC folder works like a charm when plugged into a compatible computer.
It responds to different views. It comes up in Details view by default, but others work as well. Try out List view, it's more concise.

Finally, which operating systems support a GMC? I've made it work on

Windows 7 x64
Windows 7 x86
Vista x86
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
Windows Server 2008 x86

It has not, however, worked on 64-bit Vista; trying to open an Explorer that contains one of the GMC folders causes Explorer to crash. If that happens to you, just open up an elevated command prompt and type

rd /s /q

And then press "Tab" until the folder name like "Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" or whatever you named it to appears, then press the Enter key. Also, you might do your experiments not with a folder at the root level, but instead a second-level folder -- create Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} inside a folder named "c:\test" rather in c:\ so if you do end up with a system that doesn't like GMCs, you can still open up Explorer on C: without crashing Explorer.

I hope I've offered a bit of insight and a few ideas on using what might better be called the "flat-mode Control Panel View." I'd love to hear of your experiences with it!

Conferences

Coming up...

MR&D Forum 2010! Your best value in conferences, my friends: $450 for three days with some brilliant speakers and tons o' fun. May 2-5 2010, info at www.minasiconference.com.
Techmentor Orlando March 8-12 2010: Techmentor's back and better than ever, as they return to Orlando with a great lineup of talks. I'm doing talks on DNSSEC, my in-depth Kerberos talk, Windows 7/R2 storage changes, and User Account Control. Info at www.techmentorevents.com.
TechEd US: I've been okayed for a few talks in New Orleans, so if you make it then please stop by.

To Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Read Old Newsletters or Change Your Email Address

To subscribe, visit http://www.minasi.com/nwsreg.htm. To change e-mail or other info, link to http://www.minasi.com/edit-newsletter-record.htm. To unsubscribe, link to http://www.minasi.com/unsubs.htm. Visit the Archives at http://www.minasi.com/archive.htm. Please do not reply to this mail; for comments, please link to http://www.minasi.com/gethelp.

Mark Minasi's Windows Networking Tech Page Issue #83 January 2010