Microsoft Windows 2000
Server Administrator's Companion
by Sharon Crawford & Charlie Russel
copyright (c) 2000 by Microsoft Corporation
all rights reserved

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 Command Prompt as Primary Interface

If you would love to be able to administer an NT box completely from the command line, perform the following:

  1. Modify the following registry value:

    HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon:Shell=explorer.exe

  2. Change explorer.exe to cmd.exe
Now you have a command prompt as your primary interface.  If you want the normal shell back, run explorer from the command line or set the registry key value back to explorer.exe.

All normal applications will run from the command line, you just have to know what the executable is.