Code Wizards’ Blog

For those of us who have upgraded from XP to Vista and need to run a command line (aka cmd.exe or “open command window here”) you may be a little confused.  Even searching on microsoft.com doesn’t appear to help and the Windows XP Powertoy “Open Command Line Here” isn’t usable for Vista.

Well it’s built into the OS from scratch (with an important caveat).  Simply hold down shift when getting a context menu in the RIGHT HAND panel in windows explorer (that’s correct, you read it properly, it doesn’t work in the left panel!) and hey presto it’s now an option.

If you need to go further and launch the command line as an elevated privilege (assuming you haven’t turned UAC off of course) then Microsoft Technet does have the answer, however it’s not going to be easy and it assumes that you want all of the old sysinternals tools installed (but that’s not a bad thing IMHO anyway).