In this article we will be looking at a free utility called Nircmd which is an excellent tool that offers a lot of features. When used with some imagination, it can accomplish wonders. But first let’s see what Nircmd has to offer.

Nircmd allows you to open the CD tray, dial an internet connection, increase & decrease the system volume, center all windows, remove the title bar from the ‘My Computer’ window, set a window as always on top, hide the start button on the taskbar, change the display mode of your monitor, turn off the monitor, start and stop windows services, write and delete registry entries, clipboard management, take screenshots, connect to a VPN, show/hide the start button, show/hide the clock and much much more.

Now it’s time to discuss one of the most mysterious and confusing parts of Linux to a Windows user: the command line.

To most Windows users the prospect of typing in what you want your computer to do is completely foreign and thus intimidating. It’s so intimidating in fact that Linux developers have poured countless hours into designing GUIs (graphical user interfaces) to imitate and/or replace text-based commands. But sometimes the command line is still the fastest, easiest, or only way to get something done.

With all the hype and user interfaces of Web 2.0, it seems ridiculous to go back to the old fashioned command line. Ask a geek and you will always find that he prefers the keyboard over the mouse simply because its “the damn fastest way” to work.

For our dear readers who are back in time from Year 2050’s multitouch interfaces and voice recognitions and don’t remember what a command line is, I would like to remind them that the command line is the allegedly boring but the all powerful geeky way to work, where you write commands and your system says, “yes master I will do it!” (of course it can say bad command or filename too!).