In fact, you won't find any mention of most of these hidden Windows 7 treasures in the company's official documentation. These features range from system settings through built-in utilities to lesser known keyboard navigation tricks, and everything that we’ve listed here is available without downloading anything extra (well, mostly). Oh, and while you’re here, you might also want to check out our guide to customising Windows 7.
1. God Mode
It may be hyperbolically named, but Windows 7's God Mode is indeed omnipresent. It conveniently puts hundreds of settings from all around the operating system all in one place.To turn on God Mode, create a new folder on your desktop.The resulting folder will contain 270 items, representing virtually every configurable option in Windows 7.
2. Enhanced Calculator
Windows 7's calculator has a few extra tricks up its sleeve, which you'll find under the View menu. It can perform all kinds of unit conversion (temperature, weight, area, and eight others), interesting date calculations, and even has worksheets to calculate a mortgage payment or a car's fuel mileage. It maintains a history of your previous calculations as long as the program is open.
3. Reliability Monitor
When your system's acting flaky and you're trying to figure out what's going on, the Reliability Monitor may help. Search for "reliability" from the Start menu, and run View reliability history. You'll get a graph of your system's "stability index" over a period of days and weeks (rated on a scale of 1 to 10). It displays which programs, Windows components, or miscellaneous items crashed on a given day, helping you identify problem areas.
4. Power Efficiency Report
If your Windows 7 laptop isn't getting the battery life you expect – or if it experiences power-related issues, such as the inability to go into standby or hibernate mode – the problem usually lies with incorrectly configured power management settings.
Windows 7's Power Efficiency Report can help you sniff out potential problems. Search for CMD from the Start menu, run it as an administrator (right click cmd.exe on the menu and choose Run as administrator). From the command prompt, type the following (don’t forget the space):
powercfg –energy
Your system will be scanned, and after about a minute, you'll find a file called energy-report.html in your \windows\system32 folder. Copy the report to another location and open it (you'll get a file not found error if you try to open it from the system32 folder) for detailed information about what system devices or settings are throwing a monkey wrench into your power management.
5. Pin folders to the Taskbar
You already know that you can right click your favourite programs and pin them to the Windows 7 Taskbar for easy access. Right? Although there's no such option for folders, there is another way to keep them close at hand on the Taskbar. Right click any folder, drag it to an empty space on the Taskbar (or to the Windows Explorer button), and let go when "Pin to Windows Explorer" appears. Now when you right click the Windows Explorer button, your folders will be accessible via the Jump List.
6. Wipe free disk space
It's no secret (or at least, it shouldn't be) that when you delete files or folders in Windows, they're not actually erased – the space they took up is simply marked as "available for use," which allows the files to be recoverable (with the right software) until they're overwritten with new data.
There is a utility built into Windows (even XP Pro and Vista) that will overwrite all the free space on a hard drive, ensuring any files you've deleted stay dead. Launch a command prompt and type the following:
cipher /w:X
Replace the letter X with the letter of the drive or partition you want to wipe. Be patient – the process can take a long time if you have a lot of free space.
That is all of these 6 handy hidden features on Win 7. If you have any question, feel free to leave comment below.
