I haven’t seen this featured in any other how-to guides; so I’m posting it here on this blog in the hope that somebody will find it helpful. Yes I know it’s a bit late for XP tips and tricks; but better late than never. (I have published this before elsewhere BTW.)

In the XP Menu which comes up when you press the Start button there’s a Run command-box with which you can summon a command prompt by typing “cmd” and pressing return.

That’s all very well but the operation can be uncomplicated further: For the sake of speed and efficiency it may be an idea to have an icon on the Desktop which you can simply click to open a command prompt, without all the extra hassle. Secondly to this there’s also times when you’d prefer to run the command prompt from a different root-directory than the default.

The solution is simplicity itself: Copy the file C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\cmd.exe and paste it to your desktop: When you click on the cmd.exe icon a dos window will appear with a command prompt running from directory %Systemroot%\Documents and Settings\<username>\Desktop. If you want to run the command prompt from the C: directory then copy and paste the file cmd.exe to C:, create a shortcut to C:\cmd.exe and place it on your desktop – You can copy and paste cmd.exe to any directory, therefore you can run a command prompt from any directory on any level; so if you want to run it from root-directory D: (Assuming you have a permanent local D: drive.) just copy and paste cmd.exe to D:, create a shortcut to D:\cmd.exe and place it on your desktop – or indeed anywhere else you may prefer to have the shortcut.

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