As time goes on, there are more and more people that have absolutely no clue how to use the Command Prompt in Windows. It is true you can get the vast majority of what you need to get done Windows without ever having to go to the Command Prompt, however for certain things such as IPCONFIG (seen in video below), you must go to the prompt in order to actually use...

On the PCMech LIVE show I do every week Wednesdays from 8pm-10pm EST I periodically get asked if there is an alternative way to participate in chat. This is because for some the text chat using the browser method is just too small, and/or the chat text scrolls by too fast for some to read, and so on. Yes, there is an alternative way. You can connect by using a...

Certain commands in Windows Vista and 7 require “elevation” in order to execute. For example, if you run NETSTAT -B, a notice will appear that states: The requested operation requires elevation. What does this mean exactly? It’s means you need additional permission(s) to execute the operation. This is done by executing a Command Prompt as...

Sometimes there is a need to login via FTP from the command line in Windows. Maybe you just need to login to make a quick upload or download. This tutorial will show you how to make a quick login script that will login you into your FTP server without having to type it in. To do this, we write two text files (one script, one batch) and place both of them in the...

Never let it be said that computer scripts aren’t useful. Recently a *nix bash shell script was released that allows you to search Wikipedia right from the command prompt – and it works. You can try it out for yourself if you like (scroll down on that page for the script lines) to make your own wikipedia.sh. Some of you out there may read this and...

The search engine Google has a ton of different operators you can use to find stuff faster and easier. I will say up front that only the very few have all of them committed to memory (and if you do, you use Google way too much). No, you don’t have to know all of them. However there are a few you can commit to memory that will help you out quite a...

Here are a few quick tips you can do from the command prompt in Windows XP (this will actually work in all versions of Windows since 3.1): Getting a listing of every single frickin’ thing on your hard drive in a single text file Command: DIR /S C:\*.* > C:\all.txt This will write a text file of every single file on your system (excluding hidden files)...

Continuing the subject of useful command line tools, I ran across one today which I am really thankful I found: Blat. Blat is a command line SMTP mailer. It is simple to use, just “install” Blat by specifying the default SMTP server and from address to use and then you can email text files with a single command line instruction. This is ideal for...