Discussion on:

The Command Prompt still lives in Windows Vista

I'm glad to see that Vista will still support some of the legacy things we old guys prefer. How about running 16bit programs? Will Vista still support them?

a command prompt is when there is no GUI running.

what you have there are shell windows. a completely different creature.

show me a screencap of a non gui command prompt and I'll beleive you, until then, you have a gui based shell window not a command prompt.

...the other day for no reason, I used "copy" command to copy a file.

BTW, whenever I want to get the file names in a directory I still use "dir /b > ". I do not know if this is easily possible in Windows Explorer.

Now that's not fair! I want full screen, only for really old DOS programs that we use once in a blue moon, apart from that it's good to see Microsoft have still supplied us with a command prompt.

Kind Regards,
Jim

It was reported some time back that windows was going to dump DOS with the outcome of XP or the DOS shell. As you may have noticed, most printers don?t support DOS at all. I had a client that wanted to run his old DOS accounting program and it required a printer directly attached to his LPT1 port. Before, I was able to connect him by running the command, ?net use lpt1 \\servername\queue name?. Depending on the printer, this no longer works.

There is a nifty little program called DOS2USB, that is very resonably priced that works like a charm.

I use Q&A 4.0 dos 16 bit database, and have many years worth of info compliled in it. Info is added every day, and once this little program is installed, printing from dos is a breeze.

Try Dosprint.exe. Works well in XP
Nev

The no full screen limitation is going to be bad. For some reason I still have many, many clients running dos versions of systems I wrote in the early 90's. The first one I know of just got a new laptop a couple days ago and I tried porting his property management system to it. No full screen was the worst of it. Got everything else working, but that seems insurmountable. Looking into a DOS emulator called DOSBox, but it seems not to be the tool for running large database systems as it was designed for running games. Sure would like to see a work-around for this staggering limitation...

Sorry this isn't exactly related, but does anyone know how to get the command prompt to stay open when you do ipconfig commands in windows vista? keeps closing on me instantly once it performs the command. (e.g. start>run> ipconfig /flushdns or /all and the dos window pops up but closes immediately...) any suggestions?

Go to accessories -> dos and open the command shell else alt r and type in cmd.

Yes; looks promising. I will look into it.