Jan 8 2010 7:21PM GMT

GUIDs, Shortcuts, and “GodMode” in Windows 7 and Vista

Ed Tittel Profile: Ed Tittel

Last week, I read with great interest about a well-worn Windows trick. If you couple a folder name with a specific globally unique identifier, usually called a GUID, and save it in a directory, presto! you’ve created an Explorer-centric way to jump straight into specific named Windows facilities. Ina Fried started this with a 1/4 blog entitled “Understanding Windows 7’s ‘GodMode’” followed quickly by “Windows 7 has lots of ‘GodModes’.” This morning, my favorite Windows wizard, Ed Bott, polished off this topic du jour with his own offering entitled “The Ultimate ‘Gode Mode’ list: 39 secret Windows 7 shortcuts.”

The technique for building such a shortcut is simple. Take a descriptive name, such as System (which equates to the System applet in Control Panel as it happens), then append a period, followed by a hyphenated hexadecimal string surrounded in curly brackets (which happens to be {BB06C0E4-D293-4F75-8A90-CB05B6477EEE} for the aforemented system applet. Use the whole thing

System.{BB06C0E4-D293-4F75-8A90-CB05B6477EEE}

as a folder name in Explorer, and you’ve got your shortcut.

Over the past week 39 such shortcuts have surfaced for Windows 7 only (14) and for Windows 7 and Vista (25 more). I spent a half-an-hour this morning creating a directory called GUID-Central where I defined all of these items so you can see how impressive they look in the aggregate.

Complete list of GUID shortcuts

Items that begin with W7 work only with Windows 7; items that begin with WV work with both Windows 7 and Windows Vista. But because pretty pictures go only so far, I also created a text file that contains all these strings so you can cut’n’paste between your favorite text editor and explorer to re-create any or all of these folders for yourself.

I’ve pasted that material below inside a preformatted text block on my Viztaview blog (GUID Shortcuts), so you can follow that link, then cut’n’paste as you will. I’d recommend dropping it into a text editor, then creating a folder on your Vista or Windows 7 machine, then using the text strings with the Rename command on New folders you create therein. Enjoy!