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The title is somewhat misleading. We’re not going to go over the ins and outs of XP, Vista, and 7, we’re not going to be comparing their kernels, hardware, structure of the OS, etc… This is simply on the drastic differences between the XP file system and the Vista/7 file system. Any user that switches from one OS to the other will notice that their files are stored differently.

XP

XP was somewhat revolutionary back in the day because it was a stable OS based on Windows NT, it was unlike any other Windows OS at the time, the themes were great, the graphics were state of the art, and the list goes on and on.

One advantage XP had over previous Windows Operating Systems was the file structure, how data was stored in the folders on the hard drive. This new file structure was an easy way to navigate through the hard drive to quickly find exactly the file you need. The file tree was easy to remember and it looked like the following:

This diagram does require some explanation, however. Admin, All Users, and Username (this is your account) do not all share “My Documents”. They are actually three difference types that they share. Think of this as it’s own user so no files are shared with the others.

Each user has their own documents, favorites, etc… All Users will grab anything that is shared including programs, documents, startup programs such as anti-virus, and shared desktop items like shortcuts, etc.

Vista and Windows 7

Vista and Windows 7 have a different file structure than XP and is even easier to find files and folders in my opinion. One big advantage is the cut of “documents and settings” and it being replaced by “users“. Here is the general vista and 7 file structures:

From this chart, we can see that the path to files is significantly neater than XP. There are fewer directories to deal with, less typing involved in the command prompt environment, key directories like music and pictures are not embedded in my documents folder anymore, and many more advantages.

As mentioned for the XP file structure above, Your Account and Public will not contain the same files and same directory names. They are two different users; however, Vista and Windows 7 illustrate this concept much more clearly then XP does.

DOS is an acronym that stands for Disk Operating System and was the base for Windows Operating systems until Windows 2000 when Windows NT took over. When you boil any windows os down you get dos eventually. DOS, cmd.exe, or command prompt — three terms that are not all mutually exclusive — is a very powerful tool when combating viruses, formatting your hard drive, or simply copying files and folder from one directory to another.

Please note: directories are different in XP and those examples will be clearly indicated with a line below the Vista and Windows 7 directories. So if you’re a faithful XP user, your command line is below the divider.

Note: All commands used in this tutorial series work on XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

In this tutorial, we will be going over basic DOS navigation commands. So let us begin already!

C:\> is how we often identify CMD from something like Windows Power Shell or a Unix Terminal.

This is an example of Windows Power Shell explaining foreach loops

Why would we use CMD?

There are a number of reasons why we would use CMD. Often, we use CMD to view network statuses, open Windows Utilities like System Configuration, or to delete stubborn files that we cannot delete normally.

Note: if you are using Vista or Windows 7, you will need to open cmd.exe as an administrator. This is called an elevated cmd where you start in the System32 directory and cmd.exe has full admin privileges.

Navigating Through DOS

Navigating through the command prompt is very easy and powered mostly by one simple command: cd.

cd or chdir stands for Change Directory. This allows us to change directories (or folders) in DOS. For example:

Let us assume we just opened the command prompt and we wish to navigate to the root directory of our C: drive. In order to do this we would do the following:

This is telling DOS to change the directory to C:\ or the root directory of the Hard Drive.

Using a bit more complex directories, we can navigate to our music folder from the root directory (C:\>)

Note: when using CMD, the commands and any text you write are NOT cap-sensitive. There is no difference between CHDIR and chdir, they both will work.

If we got lost in here, fret not. This brings us to our next command which is dir which stands for directory. A directory is any really just any old folder on your hard drive. This could be the Windows directory, the System32 directory, or the Music directory.

The dir commands shows us all of the directories and files within the directory we are in. Let us assume we’re back in the root directory of our C: drive and we want to see all files and folders within the C: directory we would simply type:

VISTA / 7	XP

We can see that there are many folder within the root directory of our C: drive. The Windows folder contains our operating system, the user folder contains out user accounts and personal files, and the Program Files contains all of our applications.

Switches

If you are familiar with programming then you are familiar with functions (methods for those java programmers). In DOS we have what are called switches. These switches or arguments, allow us to have a command do something specific or only do part of the command. For example,

The forward slash / designates the switch used for the DOS command.

The most important switch of all

By far the most important switch to know is /?. Confused a little? The /? switch allows us to get help with any command. Using this siwtch on a command will show us the syntax, all of the siwtches that can be used, and often it will show examples of the command in use. For example,

Using this switch, we can figure out all other switches and easily determine what we need to do. If, for instance, we wanted to show the directories and files that end with .sys except, we want them in alphabetical order, we would do the following:

This will find all files that end with .sys and place them in alphabetical order. The switch /on can be separated into two components first.

Wildcard

You may have noticed the asterisk before the .sys. This is called a wildcard. If you’ve ever done programming of any kind of are proficient in CSS, then you may have encountered this wildcard before.

Basically, a wildcard is something that allows you to do something or apply something to multiple things without having to define them all directly. This can be important when navigating through DOS. If, for instance, we’re looking for a .exe file but we don’t know the name of it or even if you know part of the name, then we can use the wildcard to find it. COnsider the following:

This will search through the entire picture folder for images that start with n and end in .jpg.

Question Mark Wildcard

The question mark is another form of wildcard with DOS. The difference is the number of character that can be used for each wildcard. The Asterisk (*) will allow up to an eight character substitution and the question mark (?) will allow for a single character substitution. For example,

This would search for any files and directories that begin with “x” and end with the file extension that starts with an “e”. These results would also return alphabetically via the switch “/on” as mentioned before.