this Windows consoleor CMD is a tool that Windows has had since the first version. But not everyone knows about it, and few even have a cursory understanding of what it can do. Especially if they always deal with the operating system through a graphical user environment. Therefore, they are unaware that the command line provides access to various system and network functions in addition to those provided by the system’s graphical interface.
If you’ve never used it, the first thing you need to do is know how to access it. You don’t need to do anything to do this because it’s already integrated into Windows. To open it, all you have to do is press the Windows button on the desktop. The Start menu will appear. At the bottom of it is a search box.
Write the letters cmd in it and press Enter, after a while an option will appear in the menu to access the console directly. It’s already on the screen.Now you just have to remember that to use some advanced system commands you need to activate the option which allows you to Run the console in administrator mode.
If you want the console to open in a folder of your choice, you can do so from the Windows GUI. First, move around in File Explorer until you get to the folder you’re interested in. Then click on the address bar that appears at the top of the window. Then type cmd into it and press Enter. That’s it. It’s that easy. When the console appears, you will see it opened in the selected folder on the command line.this is just one of themTips you can use to get the most out of your Windows console. Here are ten more.
1 – Remove programs that are not uninstalled from the system
Sometimes, when you try to uninstall a system program, there seems to be no way to do it. In most cases, this is due to a bug in the uninstall tool. To avoid problems, you can use the Windows console. To do this, once the console appears on the screen and the option to run in administrative mode is activated, type wmic at the command line and press Enter.
Then enter the product name and press Enter again. In the text that appears, find and note the name of the program that cannot be uninstalled.write when you have it product Where name = “program name” call uninstall, where program_name is the name of the program in question. Confirm what you want to do and wait for the ReturnValue = 0 entry to appear on the screen at the end of the text. If so, you have successfully uninstalled the program.
2 – Check the local IP address of the computer network card
Sometimes it is useful or necessary to know the IP address of the network that your computer uses to connect to the Internet.To do this, at the Windows console command line, type ip configuration. Press Enter and wait a few seconds. Among other things, the current IP address of the computer’s network adapter is displayed.
3 – Check who is connected via the Windows console
Checking which users are connected to the computer you are using is useful in various situations. Through the console you can see his username, email address and even the system permissions he has access to on the computer.To view it, enter Who Ami/All on the command line. Wait a few seconds after pressing Enter, and review the list of information displayed. Your information and that of other users connected to the device will be displayed on it.
4 – Take ownership of a file or folder on the system
If you ever need to remove the internal hard drive from an old laptop or computer and insert it into an external storage case, then connect it to the new computer using a simple copy and paste process to transfer the files to the computer’s storage drive. You won’t have any problems with that copy, but in doing so you risk losing the rights you’ve had up to now as the owner of the file. If this happens, you can use the Windows console to regain control of the file so that you are recognized as the file’s owner.
First, open a Windows console directly in the folder containing the file you want to restore ownership of, as we have seen.Then, on the command line, enter takeown /f filename.extension. filename is the name of the file whose ownership is to be retrieved, plus its own extension. Be sure to enter the extension carefully, because if you make a mistake, the system will not be able to find the file, even if the name is spelled correctly. If all goes well, you’ll have all the rights to the files in question later.
If you want to reclaim ownership of an entire folder and the files it contains, open a Windows console in the folder you want to reclaim after copying the folder path from the top of File Explorer. At the command line type, takeown /f folder path /r (folderpath is the path to the folder and its contents). Press Enter and the folder and its contents will immediately become your property again.
5 – Check which devices are connected to the computer
If you have administrator access to your computer and the network it’s connected to, it can be useful in some cases to see all active connections on your network. Best of all, see in real time which devices are connected to and active on your network. By doing this, you can also see their IP addresses and the ports used. Thus, you can monitor their activity and detect anomalies on the network or connected devices.
Write network statistics On the console command line, wait a moment after pressing Enter. The system searches the computer for active connections and displays the ports in use and the devices using them.To see more details about the connection, type netstat -a on the command line.
6 – Causes the contents of the text document to be displayed on the command line
This feature is not well known, but it allows you to view text files in the Windows console. It’s useful if you have to see what’s in it and you don’t have a word processing program installed, or if you have a word processing program that doesn’t work, for example.To achieve this, write input filename.extension (name and extension of the text file) in the command line and press Enter. The documentation will appear in a Windows console window.
7 – Check which drivers are installed
Drivers are responsible for telling the computer’s hardware how to communicate with Windows. That’s why it’s not just their presence that matters. They must also be reliable at all times. So if something goes wrong with them, Windows won’t work properly. If this is the case, the first thing to do to resolve the issue is to see if they are installed and updated correctly.
Write drive query At the command line, pay attention to the information displayed on the screen when you press the Enter key. Find the name of the driver you want to check, and check its LinkDate column. In it you’ll see information about its last update, which is useful for installing driver updates manually.
8 – Check for issues with your internet connection
Sometimes, when your computer is apparently offline because a website won’t open, it might not be. There may be a specific problem with your computer, most of which can be resolved by restarting the system, but it does have an internet connection. So instead of rebooting the router without doing any checks on the device, check through the Windows console to see if the connection responds.
Write ping www.webpage.com Type in the command line (that is, the URL of any page) and press Enter. Then, as a test, the device will send small packets to the server hosting the page, which will be returned by the server if there is an internet connection.
If all goes well, you’ll see information about the process appear on the screen, no packets are lost, and response times are low. In fact, the shorter the response time, the better. However, if you notice that a package is missing, you do not receive a response from the website the package was sent to, or the response takes a long time, then there is a problem with the connection.
9 – Scan Windows system files to fix problems
Sometimes Windows system files become corrupted or missing. This can be due to various reasons, but the result in these cases is always the same: an error message or a system restart. That’s why it is necessary to prevent this from happening. If you do, get them back ASAP. But first you have to see if there is anything missing. For this, Windows has a built-in file scanner that can repair the system if something goes wrong with the main system files.
To run it, you must access the Windows console and run it using the administrator function.When you activate it this way, write CSRC/scannow at the command line and press Enter. The scanner will then check the entire system for any issues.
After the scan is complete, the tool will automatically fix the faults found. If no problems are found, a message informs you that the tool called Windows Resource Protection found no system integrity violations.
10 – Check and shut down processes and tasks running on the system
While you can use Windows’ built-in Task Manager to manage running processes, it doesn’t always work as expected. Task Manager can monitor processes in real time, but you can use the command line to generate a static list that doesn’t update automatically. In this way, you can view the process list more calmly, and calmly locate and identify those processes that you do not want to close.
Type task list at the command line and press Enter. In the resulting list of running programs and tasks, find the task or process that you want to close. Write down its image name.Then again on the command line enter taskkill /im imagename.exe (imagename.exe is the name of the process) and press Enter.
You can also do this using the process’s PID, which is also shown in the list of active processes.Then, after writing, write task terminated/pid, note the PID number, and press Enter. In this case, pid is the identifier of the process you are logging. For example, taskkill /pid 7708 will kill the process identified by PID 7708.