Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.
Sticking with Microsoft Windows for 24 years (and counting) means that I know just how powerful, versatile, and delightful the OS can be with the right tools, in the hands of the right user. However, it also means that I'm aware of how messy, chaotic, and needlessly confusing the OS has become in the transition from Windows 7 to the modern Windows 11.
Where it hurts the average user the most is when they're trying to navigate through the settings on their PC. I've previously written about how this navigation seems to be caught in a confused, messy state where you find yourself being ushered from the Settings app to the Control Panel and then back. Fortunately, this usability nightmare has a fix, and ironically, it dates back to the Windows 7 era.
Windows machines have an all-in-one settings folder
And it solves a pressing issue that the Settings app doesn't
Anyone who has ever sat down on a Windows 11 desktop and felt absolutely overwhelmed with the labyrinth of menus will know half the problem with the Settings app already. One of the key principles of user experience design is that interfaces should let users recognize what they want rather than force them to recall where a specific setting can be found. It's one of the ten heuristics Jakob Nielsen published back in 1994, and the Settings app completely ignores it.
The folder that I am talking about, nicknamed "God Mode", is perhaps one of the most effective native solutions to this problem, and it does so by giving you an index of settings inside a folder instead of a menu that you have to navigate through. Every entry inside the folder is recognizable and searchable, which means searching for something like "power" fetches you "Change what the power buttons do", and a query for "printer" brings up "View devices and printers."
Setting it up is as easy as renaming a folder
Right-click, rename, paste, and you're done
To set up the folder, you'd have to right-click and create a new folder on your desktop and then rename it to the following:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}Once you've done that, all you need to do is hit Enter. If you've done it successfully, you'll notice that the folder's icon changes to Control Panel's, and double-clicking on it will open the index. It's also possible to pin it to Start or drag it into File Explorer's Quick access if you want it to be one click away from any window, but doing so requires an additional step.
What you've essentially done is you've instructed Windows to turn the new folder you created into a shortcut to the system's All Tasks list, and the CLSID after the period is an identifier that has pointed to the same place since Windows 7 (Vista Build 6000, to be precise), so this works on every Windows version that has been released since 2007. Since it's just an index of those settings, deleting the folder changes nothing else on your system, including the changes you made via the God Mode settings toggles.
I have a God Mode folder on every Windows PC I own
And it's best kept on quick access or the start menu
I've always felt that navigating through tons of menus imparts a lot of cognitive burden, and it doesn't help when you have a busy workflow. I'd argue that, to an extent, almost every workflow relies on toggling one setting or the other or accessing one control panel or another, and the default modern and legacy Windows settings applications make it tedious for all users.
My desk has a benchmarking rig and a daily driver, and both have the folder pinned to Start, and that's only because the Settings app has made it excruciatingly slow to go through. Before a CPU or a GPU benchmark run, often I'd need to adjust settings like processor state limits, PCIe link power management, and USB selective suspend settings. All of those settings are just one shortcut and a search away through God Mode.
Like I said, getting it pinned to the start takes an additional step, but when you get the hang of using it, you'll likely reach for it all the time like I do. To do this, you'd have to right-click on your desktop, head to New, and then select Shortcut. In the location box, you'd have to paste the following:
explorer.exe shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}You'll then have to click next, name it "God Mode" and hit Finish. Then, you can manage this folder the way you'd manage any other folder. You can drag it to your taskbar, launch it, or pin it to your File Explorer.
There's no reason not to use the God Mode
You can't stumble upon God Mode by accident, which tells me it wasn't supposed to be discovered on accident either. I think that's such a bit of a shame since it's a utility in its own right that will be appreciated in power user workflows that rely a lot on making small adjustments to the settings to test hardware and software utilities, just like how it has become irreplaceable in my own workflow.