Now I’m not one to advocate cheating in general. But with the freebie games that come with Windows, your mother probably won’t scold you for your dishonesty if you cheat a little while you are goofing off.
Okay so you have played seven games of solitaire and lost every single time. In the real world when you play three-card solitaire, the classic way to cheat is to pick up one card at a time instead of three. As it turns out, you can do the same thing in the virtual solitaire world as well. The trick is to hold down the Ctrl + Alt + Shift keys as you click on the deck.
If you are a FreeCell addict, you’ll like this little bit of assistance. If you’re struggling to figure out your next move, press Ctrl+Shift+F10. This key combination brings up a dialog box that says "User-Friendly User Interface." You have a choice of clicking one of three buttons: Abort, Retry, or Ignore. If you click Abort, you win the game. If you click Retry, you lose the game, and Ignore cancels the dialog box. After you make your selection, moving any card ends the game the way you wanted. Since FreeCell is hard, it’s kind of nice to see what happens when you actually win. Most people already know what losing looks like.
Along the same lines, you can also always win at Minesweeper if you know what to do. Basically you can get Minesweeper to tell you where the mines are, so you don’t click on them. To do it, start up Minesweeper. Now type xyzzy. Press Shift+Enter and minimize all the other windows on your desktop. Then as you mouse over the blocks keep an eye on the uppermost left pixel on your desktop screen (yes it’s tiny). The pixel will turn white when it’s safe to click and black when you find a mine. Click only when the pixel is white and you’ll win!