Windows Command Line Tips

On Windows Vista and Windows 7, with the default settings, we can't install unsigned third party drivers. We need to enable test signing to install such drivers. We can enable this from command prompt using the below command.

Note that you can run above command only from elevated administrator command prompt. Otherwise you will get error as shown below.

Windows media player can be launched from Run window by running the command wmplayer.

This command does not work from command prompt as the environment variable 'PATH' will not have media player binaries location path. You can directly launch the exe by specifying its location path in full.

Sticky notes application can be launched from command line by running the command 'Stikynot'. Same command can also be used from Run window too.

Snipping tool makes it easy to capture snapshot of the current screen. We can launch this tool from command line by running 'snippingtool' command. Same command can be used from Run command too.

This tool is not available in Windows XP/Server 2003.

While working in command prompt, many times we face a situation where we have to change to a directory on another drive. For example currently I am working in c:\users\techblogger folder and if I want to change to the directory e:\data\documents\ normally what I do is changing to the e: drive first and then doing 'cd' to the data\documents directory.

Instead of executing two commands we can do the same thing in a single command by using /d switch with cd command.