Vista Command Prompt

So my new Dell Studio 15 laptop is a (great) step down from my old trusted Dell Latitude X300, but it was unfortunately a matter of funds this time :-( Anyway, long story, but I needed to get the "Create a command prompt here" functionality working on my new (Asta La) Vista system. This is the functionality that allows you to right click on any folder icon in Explorer and open a DOS Command Prompt in that folder.

In an earlier blog entry I showed a simple registry hack to do this on Windows XP and it is just as simple to do it on Windows Vista. Simply open your favorite text editor (e.g. TextPad), copy the following 5 lines, and save the file with a .reg extension, e.g. CommandPromptVista.reg. Then simply execute the file. You could also manual update the registry using RegEdit, but that is much more error prone (and slow).

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\CommandPrompt]
@="Command Prompt:"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\CommandPrompt\Command]
@="cmd.exe /k cd %1″

Nifty.