Timeless Tales

Windows Command Line prompt is a most efficient and faster way of doing things in Windows XP. Here's a run-down of the most useful DOS commands available in Windows XP. Some of these DOS commands even do not have an visual alternative.

DOS Command-line tools must be run at the prompt of the Cmd.exe command interpreter. To open Command Prompt, click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.

ipconfig - Windows IP configuration
Useful for troubleshooting your internet connection.Displays the current IP address of your computer and the DNS server address. If you call your ISP for reporting a bad internet connection, he will probably ask you to run ipconfig.

fc - Free BeyondCompare in XP
FC is an advanced DOS Command that compares two files and displays the differences between them. Though the file comparison results are not as interactive as BeyondCompare or Altova DiffDog, fc is still very useful. You can even set fc to resynchronize the files after finding a mismatch.

type - open text files sans Notepad
Similar to Unix cat command, Type is my favorite DOS command for displaying the contents of a text files without modifying them. When used in combination with more switch, type splits the contents of lengthy text files into multiple pages. Avoid using the type command with binary files or you'll hear alien PC beeps and see some greek characters on your PC.

ping - Say hello to another Computer
Ping network command followed by the web-address or IP address tells you about the health of the connection and whether the other party is responding to your handshake request. Ping tool can also be used to convert the web address to a physical IP address.

tree - visual directory structure
You often need to take prints of your physical directory structure but XP has no simple "visual" commands for printing directory contents. Here, try the Tree DOS command and redirect the output to a text file.

tree > mydirectory.txt
print mydirectory.txt

attrib - make hidden files visible
Attrib lets you change attributes of System files and even hidden files. This is great for troubleshooting Windows XP. Say your XP doesn't boot ever since you edited that startup boot.ini file (Hidden), use attrib to remove the Hidden attibute and edit the file using EDIT dos command.

assoc - which program will open that .xyz file
The assoc DOS command can be used to either isplay or even modify the file name extension associations. The command assoc .htm will quickly tell you the name of your default web browser (see picture)

move - more flexible than copy-paste
Say you got a lot of XLS and DOC files in you MyDocuments folder and want to move only those XLS files that have their name ending with 2006. In XP Explorer, you have to manually select each file and then cut-paste to another folder. However, the DOS move command make things much simpler. Just type the following at the command prompt:
move *2006.xls c:\2006Reports\

find - advanced file search with filter
Find is the most powerful DOS command and even more useful than the Windows Desktop Search tool or the Windows Find Wizard. The find command searches for a specific string of text in a file or files. After searching the specified file or files, find displays any lines of text that contain the specified string.

To search your hard disk to find and display the file names on drive C: that contain the string "Google" use the pipe (|) to direct the results of a dir command to find as follows:
dir c:\ /s /b | find "Google"

Quick tip - Drag to avoid typing: When your command acts on a file or folder, you must type the path to that folder after the command. You can save typing time by dragging the file or folder from Windows Explorer into the command window.

To view help at the command-line, at the command prompt, type the following:
CommandName /?

There are certain programs that Windows will start every time you
boot up your system, and during the startup phase, they're all
competing for a slice of your CPU speed. Extra or unwanted items
in the startup list will definitely increase your startup time, perhaps
by several minutes. Some common examples are things related to
AOL, RealPlayer, Napster, instant messengers, and video managers.
If you're not sure about an item, no big deal. You can turn it off,
restart your PC, and see if everything seems to work. If not, you can
always go back and re-enable an item in the Startup list. This tip
alone should speed up your start-up by 250%. Here are is what
you have to do:

1. Go to Start button  Run
2. Type "msconfig", without quotations
3. Hit enter key or click the OK button
4. A System Configuration Utility window will show up
5. Click the Startup tab
6. In the Startup tab you will see several boxes and some of them
will selected (checked). All you have to do is to uncheck
extra items that are of no use. If you run an antivirus
program it is not recommended to uncheck it.
7. After making you choices press the OK button, you will be
prompted to restart computer to apply changes.
8. After restarting your computer a dialogue will be displayed.
You can check the option for not showing this dialogue every
time your PC reboots.

Areas to save disk space
- Turn off or decrease size of disk usage for system restore
If your not using the Windows System Restore feature, then why have it enabled?
If you are using it, perhaps you want to re-evaluate how much disk space its using up (which can be several GigaBytes) for saving checkpoints. If you only want to have 1 or 2 good saved checkpoints to restore from decrease the allocated space for system restore to a few hundred meg.

- Decrease the disk usage size of the recycle bin
The most common area on a users PC in which Windows allocates a chuck of space for itself is the recycle bin. If you rather have files be deleted instantly and not put in the recycle bin or you want to decrease the space it uses to hold deleted files

- Empty or Decrease your Web Browsers disk usage for Cached files
Every web browser has a preferences or options area to adjust the temporary internet files and cache usage. In this video tutorial we use Internet Explorer as an example on how to save space with an adjustment of the temporary internet files space it uses.

- Disable Hibernation in Windows.
If you don't know what Hibernation is , chances are you aren't using it. You might want to disable it to save a few Gigabytes of space that function requires as shown in the video tutorial.
For Vista users you can open command prompt and type powercfg -H off

-Run the Windows Clean Manager
Windows comes already with a built in cleaner that does simple basic tasks to free up disk space.
To access it click start -> Run -> type cleanmgr -> press OK

Google users will soon be able to upload any file type to Docs (as long as it’s under 250MB) — as opposed to the very limited slate of document types currently supported (like images, Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations).

Tech news blog TechCrunch quotes Google Docs product manager Vijay Bangaru emphasising that this is not the much speculated GDrive, but they appropriately point out that — regardless of what they’re calling it — it sure sounds like the GDrive people were expecting. Users will get 1GB of free storage to hold whatever they want, and they can buy more storage space for $US0.25 per GB.

Upload your files and access them anywhere with Google Docs [Official Google Blog]