Here’s a little hackety-hack that you may find useful if you’re running a network comprised of computer or computers running Windows XP and computer or computers running Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit.).

You may remember, quite a while ago – probably as far back as 2008 in fact – I published an article describing how to create a command icon on your desktop (+ also in any other file of your choosing.) in Windows XP. (I’m not even sure whether that article is available any longer on this blog. – There’s been a few dropped in the rebuild I did of this blog in November 2010.)

The purpose of creating such an icon was to save the necessity of clicking RUN and typing “cmd” ¬ , as well as having the dos command prompt run from a directory of your choice, rather than the directory in your user-profile pre-selected by Microsoft.

To accomplish this massive feat of system-hackery in XP, all you needed to do was to copy the file “command.exe” – or “cmd.exe”, or “cmd.com” – I forget which one it was now, and I’m not running XP any more so I can’t quickly reference it. We’ll refer to it as “command.exe” in this article – from the C:WINDOWS/System32 directory to any file of your choosing from which you wanted to run a command-prompt.

- Now in Windows 7 if you call up a command-prompt, you’ll find that Microsoft have pre-selected the directory C:Users/username to run the command-prompt from. If you try to find a command.exe file in Windows 7 then the nearest you’ll find, again in C:Windows/System32, is a file named “com”. You can check that you’ve got the right one by clicking on the “comrepl.exe” file inside it and a command window flashes onto your screen for a fraction of a second.

There’s probably a way to use this com folder to accomplish the purpose of creating a command icon on your Windows 7 desktop. Personally I haven’t bothered to find out how because I did it the lazy way. What exactly is the lazy way? – Read the following: -

At the time I had a desktop computer running Windows XP Professional 32-bit XP  networked via my router to another desktop computer, (The one I’m typing this article on, in fact.) running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I wanted a command icon on my Windows 7 desktop, so I copied the command icon from my Windows XP desktop across the network to my Windows 7 desktop. I didn’t think it would work, but when I clicked it – Et voila – a fully-functional command-prompt appeared! ‘Don’t believe me? See the picture below: It’s not on a Windows XP desktop as you can’t get the Aero-Glass effect in Windows XP, and the path to the User Profile is also different in XP to that stated in the command-window in Windows 7… Strangely and curiously, though, the command-window that the icon generates still bears the identifying marks of a Windows XP installation!

Are there any drawbacks or issues with using this method? Well I first did this with a Windows 7 64-bit beta, then I did same with the 64-bit RC, and same again when I purchased my RTM copy of Win 7 64-bit Home Premium. – So I’m going back to 2009 here. In those 2 years I can safely say that having done so on all of the Win 7 installations I’ve used has caused no problems whatsoever.

If you would like a copy of the relevant file from Windows XP, then you can download one from here.

In summary, then,  copying the desktop command icon that you may well have made in Windows XP, after reading my relevant article, to Windows 7 across your home network will give you a fully-working command icon which you can once again place in any folder within Windows 7. Provided that you have no objection to the command window telling you that you’re using Windows XP, even though you’re obviously not, you have what you wanted and everything runs as smooth as a flow of delicious chocolate running down a blank PCB tilted at 45 degrees.