This may be old news to a lot of you, but I have come across a very nifty trick in Windows Vista.

One of the many Vista frustrations is the lack of a command prompt. Sometimes there are things that just can't be done without a C:> to work with.

So... open up Windows Explorer. Drill down the Explorer tree until the subdirectory you wish the command prompt to be active in is in the right-hand pane. Shift-Right-Click that folder, and you will get a menu in which one of the offerings is "Open Command Window Here". Click on that and you are instantly at a command prompt in that subdirectory.

This will work for folders on the desktop and folders in the right-hand pane of Explorer, but not folders in the left hand pane.

tanstaafl.

The command prompt is still there and easy to get to (in fact arguably easier to get to than before).

Just open the Start menu, type "cmd" and hit return.

Also, the old Run dialog is still there as well. Just hit Windows-R anywhere.

I agree, "open command window here" is a great feature of Vista.

There was a similar "command prompt here" powertoy back in the Windows XP days, but you had to find it, download it, and install it. (Actually I think it was just some clever registry entries, but anyway.)

I learned about it when I started at Microsoft, just a few days before Vista's first release, when a coworker saw me trying to get the XP version of that powertoy working on my Vista dev box. I was very impressed that Microsoft had finally added it as a feature of the OS.

It's got some annoying limitations, though. You can't rightclick on *anything*, and I really wish you could. For instance, as you said, if you have a two-pane explorer window up, you can't right-click on the folders in the tree in the lefthand pane, you have to use the tree navigate to one of the parent folders and then shift-rightclick on the desired child folder in the righthand pane. That maddens me greatly.

Although it is nifty that you can do it on the desktop. It makes the desktop a viable place for me to download and futz with files sometimes.