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Win7 God Mode

Alex Peck — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 09:36:04 +0000

Windows 7 provides a hidden shortcut to all control panels. Simply create a new folder and rename it as:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

It’s not quite TweakUI, but it is quite handy.

Change keyboard layout on Windows XP Login Screen

Alex Peck — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:10:32 +0000

Having changed my password to include £ (I tend to use a UK keyboard layout) I found I was no longer able to login to several XP VMs with US layout on the login screen. Since my laptop doesn’t have a numeric keypad I couldn’t even use right ALT+156. I even tried to cheat using the onscreen keyboard’s numeric keypad, but this didn’t work either.

Some newer versions of Windows display the input region widget on the login screen if you install multiple input locales. On XP, I couldn’t get this to appear.

To get around this, I found it is possible to change the default keyboard settings in the registry. Obviously I had to log in using the local Admin account in order to make this change, which fortunately had a password I was able to type.

Inside Windows 7 Redux

Alex Peck — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:10:11 +0000

Mark Russinovich talks about a few of the improvements made in the Windows 7 generation kernel. It’s interesting to hear how Windows has been refactored towards a well defined architecture. As you would expect, this not only makes it easier to understand dependencies, but also improved performance and testability. The idea of API sets as a level of indirection when components link against .dlls stood out to me.

Skip straight to 24:30 for some serious task manager porn.