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10 Useful Windows CMD Commands That Every User Should Know

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The Windows command prompt is an important feature that has been a core part of the Windows operating system for a long time. There are several useful cmd commands that are sometimes easy and a little complex to use. This is the reason why people don’t want to learn the command prompts. However, the users of the command prompt commands will be aware of its importance and understand how powerful it is.

Below we have compiled a list of good and useful windows cmd commands that may help you be more productive. Because there are many functions like creating an undeletable folder, hiding some files, getting the name and details of every driver installed in our system and several other things which you can perform just from the command prompt.

Useful CMD Commands

Here are some of the effective CMD Commands that you should know

1: ASSOC or Fix File Associations

ASSOC command is one of the most powerful tools in the CMD command library 

Your PC associates certain file extensions with certain programs. This is how your computer knows to open an Adobe program when you double click on a PDF file, or open Microsoft Word when you double click on DOC document.

By typing ASSOC in the command window you can easily view all the file associations your computer knows. Then you will see the file extension and the program it’s associated with.

.doc=Word.Document.8. By typing this you can set the association 

2. FC or File Compare

It’s pretty hard to remember what the differences were between versions sometimes when files are changed over time. You might not know that a windows cmd command offers the ability to compare files and see all differences, but it’s somewhat true.

The File Compare command performs either an ASCII or a binary file comparison and will list down all of the differences that it finds in the system.

  • A command prompt of Fc /a File1.txt File2.txt will compare two ASCII files.
  • A command prompt of Fc /b Picture1.jpg Picture2.jpg will do a binary comparison on two images.

3. IPCONFIG or IP Configuration

We all are aware that network troubleshooting has never been easy, but the IPCONFIG command makes it much easier.

By using this command in the cmd command prompt returns a piece of detailed information about your current network adapter connection including:

  • Your Current IP Address
  • The Subnet Mask
  • The Default Gateway IP
  • And lastly your Current domain

You can fix your router issues and other connection issues you could be having with your network adapter through this information.

4. NETSTAT or Network Statistics

If you are concerned that you could have some malware running on your computer that’s connecting to internet locations without you knowing about it?

Running a NETSTAT command in the command prompt would be the best option for you. Through this command, you can get access to the list of all active TCP connections from your computer.

5. PING or Send Test Packets

If you are an IT Analyst then we know your best friend is the PING command.  Running this cmd sends test packets over the network to the particular target system.

If you want to know whether your computer can access another computer, a server, or even a website you can use the PING command. It helps with revealing network disconnections. This cmd also provides you with transit time for the packets in milliseconds, so it also shows a bad network connection as well.

6. TRACERT or TraceRoute

A fascinating windows cmd is TRACERT. You can use TRACERT if you are ever curious to see the path your internet traffic takes to get from your browser to a remote system like Google servers.

The cmd stands for “Trace Route”, which sends packets out to a remote destination which can be a server or website and brief you with all of the following information:

  • Number of hops or intermediate servers before getting to the destination
  • The time it takes to reach each hop
  • It reveals the IP and sometimes the name of each hop

This command also can reveal how the routes of your internet requests change depending on where you are accessing the web. It also helps you with troubleshooting a router or switch on a local network that might be problematic.

7. POWERCFG or Power Configuration

If you are also facing a problem with your laptop’s power life,  It could be possible that your power settings are configured as efficiently as possible. POWERCFG or Power configuration windows cmd command can help you in this situation. You need to run the command prompt as an administrator and then type powercfg – energy to get a full power efficiency report on the laptop.

Also read: Everything About Powershell And Command Prompt In Windows

The process can take up to about a minute so you need to be patient. But when it is done, you will see whether there are any warnings or errors that might help you improve the power efficiency of your computer or laptop.

Now you can view the energy-report.html file to see the details of those errors and warnings.

8. SHUTDOWN or Turn Off Computer

If you are looking for a command prompt that lets you shut down the computer but also control the behaviour of that shutdown then you should go for the SHUTDOWN CMD. It is a pretty versatile prompt and commonly used as a scheduled task or part of an IT batch job after patches have been applied to a computer system.

If you type shutdown /i from the command prompt this will initiate a shutdown, but it will use a GUI to give the user to choose between options on whether to restart or do a full shutdown. If you don’t want to have any GUI pop up on the screen, then you can just issue a shutdown /s command.

There exists a long list of other functions you can use to do a logoff, restart, hibernate and more. You need to type shutdown without any arguments to see them all.

9. SYSTEMINFO or System Information

If you want to know several details like which brand of network card you have, the processor details, or the exact version of your Windows OS, the SYSTEMINFO command prompt can help you in this case.

This command runs a check on your system and pulls the most important information about your laptop or PC. The whole list of information is presented in a clean format that’s easy to read.

10. SFC or System File Checker

There are command prompt commands that can scan your files if you feel that a virus or some other software might have corrupted your core system files.

You need to launch this CMD as an administrator, to this just right-click and choose Run as Administrator. If you type SFC /SCANNOW, this will check the integrity of all protected system files. However, If a problem has been found, the files will then be repaired with backed-up system files.

The SFC or the System File Checker command also lets you:

  • /VERIFYONLY: Check the integrity but don’t repair the files on PC.
  • /SCANFILE: Scan the integrity of the specific files and fix if they are found corrupted.
  • /VERIFYFILE: Verify the integrity of specific files but don’t really repair them.
  • /OFFBOOTDIR: Use this cmd to do repairs on an offline boot directory.
  • /OFFWINDIR: Use this command to do repairs on an offline Windows directory.
  • /OFFLOGFILE: Specify a path to save a log file with the scanned results. However, you need to give the time as the scan can take up to 10 or 15 minutes.

So, these were some of the cool, interesting cmd commands that will surely help you understand your PC better. We hope these tips are beneficial for your system to become more productive.

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