Today when I enter 'ipconfig' as a Command Prompt I get a message :
'ipconfig' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

It was OK the other day. ( This time I'm trying to check the OUI on my MAC address, since you ask. )

add "C:\WINDOWS\system32;" to the start of my PATH environment variable, like this:

  • Log in with Administrator priviledges.
  • Right-click "My Computer" & select "Properties."
  • Click "Advanced" tab.
  • Click "Environment Variables" button.
  • In the "System variables" box, scroll down to "PATH" and highlight it.
  • Click the "Edit" button.
  • In the "Variable value:" box, add to the very beginning of the text "C:\WINDOWS\system32;" without my quotation marks.

Make sure you include the semicolon.
Click OK three times.

Reference http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-networking/ipconfig-is-not-recognized-as-an-internal-or/e6315591-d900-41ba-89a6-dfc0e2623019

If that doesn't work, command prompt works on exe files, so ipconfig is really a separate program. If you cd to system32 and type dir /w and ipconfig.exe is not there then you need to download it. Also you can set environment variables through command prompt by typing set system root "C:\windows\system32". If none of those work then I don't know what to tell you.

Go to the root of your C drive and type

dir ipconfig.* /s

If it has disappeared from c:\windows\system32 you might still have a copy cached in a sub-folder which you can copy back to c:\windows\system32. Note, youy will need to open a command shell as asministrator to do that.

Seriously... If IPCONFIG.EXE is missing, just copy it over from another winodws system.

Thanks to everybody, especially **IIM.

That did work, even though it was designed for XP, meaning it had 'My Computer' instead of 'Computer'.

Any idea how or why that disappeared in the first place, given that it was working a couple of weeks ago,
and I am not aware of doing anything that might have changed such parameters ?

Or to put it another way : to prevent this happening AGAIN, what should I AVOID doing ? Thanks.

For your environmental variables to have changed, someone or something (another program) would have had to had done it intentionally. There's nothing that I can think of that would have caused your path variable to change by accident or something you unintentionally did unless you issued some commands within the command prompt that dealth with PATH, or were in the Environmental variables in system properties.

no, still can't think of anything in command prompt I did that might be related.

Something to do with a recent system update ?

Speaking of which, what annoys me now is that recently when I switch on my machine,
a picture of me comes up as the named user and I have to click on it to start.

Something ELSE I reset accidentally ?

Hard to say other than this incident is uncommon to rare. I don't think an update did this, specifically MS updates.

Thanks. Question Solved. Thread Closed.

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