This week's tip is uber-useful. I know that I have shared this tip before. I shared it with either my Facebook friends, or with my classmates in college. In either case, it is a tip that is worth repeating for any who may have missed it. However, I do feel that it is necessary for a mild disclaimer.
Normally Tuesday's are geared toward the novice user. This week I would say this tip is more for the power user. That is not to say that a novice cannot use it or activate it. I will make it very easy and painless, but this tip is very powerful and unleashes some functions that you can play with that if you don't know what you are doing you can mess things up royally. Don't let this scare you though. Even if you are a novice this tip has things that you can use. Just use caution messing with things that you are unfamiliar with.
In addition, I have three bonus tips for those of you that I have already shared Godmode with. The first bonus tip is why you should not use your desktop as a catchall for files, downloads, and other minutiae. The second bonus tip stems from a question I got about Windows moving icons around and not allowing the user to place a shortcut icon where desired. This tip will allow you place icons on your desktop wherever you wish. The third bonus tip is for my Mac users. In this one I will explain how to change the defaults for screen shots.
While it may be a bit lengthy, this Tech Tip Tuesday has a little something for everyone. Let's get to it . . .
Windows 7 God Mode
This post is not called Windows 7 God Mode just because it is powerful, it's not called God Mode because it makes you feel like a god, although it does both of those things. It is called Windows 7 God Mode because that is literally what it is called. Let me tell you how to activate it and then I will tell you what it does.
1) Right click on your desktop and select Create Folder.
2) Now name it: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
3) Copy and paste that name to make it easier for you.
4) The folder icon will change to what kind of looks like a control panel.
Now inside this folder you will find all manner of settings and tweakable goodness. There are 45 categories of settings for you to mess with. Far too many for me to list here let alone tell you what settings are within each category (one category has as many as 26 settings), so you will just have to explore to discover for yourself. However, I can list a few of the more useful categories and settings:
- In the category Action Center the setting heading "Restore your computer to an earlier time" will open the System Restore dialog.
- Date and Time category is useful as a whole.
- Many settings in the Display category are useful.
- Under Folder Options the "Show or hide file extensions" is handy. So is "Show hidden files and folders", but more on this one in a future Tech Tip Tuesday.
- Everything under Getting Started is helpful especially for the beginner user or those new to Windows 7.
There are many, many more hidden gems that you will find in this useful folder. Just be careful to only mess with those options that are familiar to you. If you have any questions about any of the options in the GodMode folder, post them here as comments and I'll address them as soon as possible.
Bonus Tip One
The desktop of our computers is a very convenient place to put items that you use frequently or to temporarily place a file that you might need right away. After all, even a real-life desktop is designed for a very similar purpose. However, just like real-life desktops, our computer desktops can quickly become a cluttered mess. Not only does this slow down productively by forcing us to look for something that we even just recently placed there, it also slows down the computer itself.
Every time you boot your computer, regardless of what operating system you use, it goes through a booting process which loads a bunch of stuff into the operating system. One the the things that gets loaded is your desktop. This is something that most of us never really think about. We tend to think that the desktop is just there, but it's not. It has to be loaded into the RAM every time you boot up or even wake your computer from hibernation. Every time the desktop loads, each icon on it has to be rendered (rendered is just a fancy term for drawn). Rendering takes computer cycles. Some icons such as simple folder icons only take a couple of cycles and load quickly, but other icons, for example, picture icons that show a preview of the picture, can take much longer. So the more icons you have sitting on your desktop, the longer your boot-up time. The RAM consumed by your icons is not normally a consideration, but if you have a lower end computer that consistently uses most of it's RAM, removing desktop icons may not help, but cannot hurt.
So here's what you do. First, anything that has been sitting on your desktop unused for more than a month, either delete it it put it in a folder some where. Even if you have to create a folder on your desktop and put a bunch of unused icons there, that is better than having them lying all over the place. If you have picture icons on your desktop, put them in your pictures folder. The same goes for documents, videos, songs, or any other file that has another logical location to reside.
Second, the desktop is a very convenient place to temporarily place downloads. In fact, often when I am remote troubleshooting for someone and I need them to download a file, I will have them save it to the desktop so that we don't have to spend anytime trying to find it. However, these downloads should be deleted when done or at least moved to the downloads folder. Minimize the icons on your desk to these three things (listed in order of importance):
1) Shortcut icons to applications that you use everyday.
2) Folders (as few as possible) containing files or shortcuts to files that you use frequently.
3) Files or icons that you need to have temporary access to that you will remove before shutting down your computer.
These things will give you a variable pick up on boot time depending on your system and how much you have on the desktop, but most of all you will be much more capable of find what you need when you need it without scanning every icon on your desktop. Of course, me being the big fat cheater that I am have a shortcut for you so you don't have to worry about all of this. Right-click your desktop and under "View" uncheck "Show desktop icons". All of your icons will disappear leaving you with a nice clean desktop that has nothing to render on boot except your wallpaper. When you want to show the icons again, just recheck this option. You of course lose the benefit of having a nice clean desktop that is easy to navigate, but you still gain the small bonus in start up time.
Bonus Tip Two
A reader asked, "how do I keep Windows from moving my desktop icons? I create a shortcut and put it where I want it, but it keeps snapping back in line with all the other icons. I don't want this." This is a good question and can be quite puzzling if you don't know what is happening, but it is quite simple to fix.
There are two Windows desktop setting that you will want to become familiar with: "Auto arrange icons" (Auto Arrange) and "Arrange icons to grid" (Grid Arrange). Both of these options are located under the "View" menu when you right-click the desktop.
Auto Arrange will arrange all your icons in nice neat columns acording to what is selected under the "Sort" menu. By default Sort is set to Name which means that with Auto Arrange your icons will be placed in alphabetical order (columnwise) to the left of the desktop. Sort can also be set to arrange by date, size, or type as well. So with only Auto Arrange selected, no mater where you drag and drop or create a new file, it will snap in to the location that it belongs according to the Sort option you have set.
Grid Arrange makes sure all your icons are lined up horizontally and vertically, but the icons can be placed anywhere you wish. So with only Grid Arrange checked, you can place icons to the right side, bottom, top, whatever, it doesn't matter, but wherever you place it Windows will snap it to the closest grid location. This keeps all your icons neatly aligned, but allows you to have them wherever you want them on the entire desktop. This is how I usually have it set.
You can also have both Auto and Grid Arrange checked. What this does is place all the icons in columns on the left of the desktop, but allows you to place the icons in any order you wish. In other words, it automatically arranges them so you don't have stray icons way off to the right side of the screen, but it ignores the Sort setting.
Finally, you can have both unchecked and this allows completely unfettered icon placement. You can place icons absolutely anywhere you want, even on top of each other. This tends to lead to a pretty messy desktop, so I don't care to have it set up this way, but to each his own. As you can see, this tip somewhat tied into the first tip about keeping a tidy desktop and you will see that the Mac tip also ties into the first bonus tip.
Bonus Tip Three
A while back I did a Tech Tip on Facebook regarding the versatility of the OS X screen capture (believe me when I say that it blows Windows "Prt Sc" out of the water although Windows 7 Snipping Tool is much better than Prt Sc). I'm not going to rehash that Tech Tip here unless someone requests it. However, there is one aspect of screen captures that I did not get into with that Tech Tip because I felt it was maybe a little on the advanced side. But with all this talk of keeping tidy desktops I really thought that explaining how to change the default file type and especially the default save location of screen captures was appropriate. Do not worry that I said this tip is more advanced. It is only so because you have to use the terminal to execute it, but I will make this painless, simple, and safe.
When you do a screen capture using any method in OS X, by default that cap is in the Portable Network Graphics (.png) format. In addition, when you use one of the screen capture methods that saves the .png, the default location to save it is the desktop. Now if you do a lot of screen captures, which I do, your desktop can become filled with these picture files. In OS X picture files on the desktop are by default rendered as previews, so you can see where I'm going with this. After a while all those caps slow down the boot process unless you move them to a folder, but why can't you just have them saved to a folder to begin with? And what if you would rather the caps be saved in Joint Photographic Experts Group (jpeg or .jpg) or Graphics Interchange Format (.gif)? Well, I'll tell you how you can change these defaults with just a couple of terminal commands. So of course the first thing that you have to do for this tip is open a terminal session. You can think of the terminal as the stuff going on behind the pretty graphics, or if you are familiar with Windows' command line, it is basically the same thing. To start a terminal session from the dock click on Applications->Utilities->Terminal.
Changing the Default Format
To change the format that OS X saves screen captures in, type the following commands into the terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer
Of course you will want to replace the png with whatever format you want the screen captures to be saved in (jpg, gif, tiff, etc).
Changing the Default Save Location
To change the location where screen captures are stored type the following commands into the terminal window:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/STiBoy/Documents/Screenshots
killall SystemUIServer
And of course in this case you would replace /Users/STiBoy/Documents/Screenshots with the path to the folder you want to save them in.
Simple as that. I hope you enjoyed this week's Tech Tips. As always if you have any questions or comments, please leave them. I screen comments for spam so be assured that if you have a question I will most certainly read it and try to answer it.
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