The Minesweeper is to Windows as Snake was to the early Nokia phones. This very simple but mind bending little game has been bundled with Windows for many years (although it is not bundled with Windows 8 by default) and has long been a favorite time waster for many Windows users.

But did you know that there are ways that you can beat (cheat) Minesweeper? I know that this might not be interesting to all people (and some people might wish that they never found out these cheats because it gives them an easy way to finish a game) so only read on if you really want to know how to beat this game.

Here are a couple of cheats that work with Minesweeper and will help you fool your friends with your amazing scores and times:

How To Reveal Mines
Yes, the normal way to do this is to click on squares until you hit a mine but there is a more craft way to do this.

1. First what you should do is make the your desktop background a very dark color (preferably black), you will see why you do this later.
2. Open Minesweeper.
3. Hover your mouse cursor over the field.
4. Type the following characters “XYZZY” (they do not need to be capital letters.
5. Press the Enter key and the Shift key together and release
6. Press the Enter key and release
7. Now if you look extremely closely you will see a very small white dot in the top left corner of your desktop (not much bigger than a couple pixels)
8. This dot will go black when you are hovering over a mine and will go white when you are not hovering over a mine
9. You are safe to click away!

How To Stop The Clock

The main aim of Minesweeper is to find all the mines in the shortest time possible, but what if you could stop the clock while you plan out your next click? Well you can if you follow these simple steps:

1. When you have Minesweeper open press the Windows Key and ‘D’ key together. The Minesweeper window will minimize and the desktop will come up.
2. Click on the Minesweeper application in the system tray. This will bring up Minesweeper again and the clock will be stopped!
3. Now you can look at the board, plan your next move and the clock is not running.

So now you know how to cheat the system you can post your record times below in the comments :)