Hi, I'm running windows XP and when I try to run commands in the DOS prompt nothing happens. Even the simplest commands such as DIR. I can change directories, but thats it. If someone could help I'd appreciate it.

Luke if you care to search these forums you will find liteally thousands of posts which will tell you "there is no DOS in XP", an emulator yes but no DOS. Forget it!

What the crap? What kind of answer is that? "there is no DOS in XP"? How does this answer his question? Of course XP does not contain MS-DOS, and good riddance I say, but the Command Interpreter is extremely reminiscent of DOS and so it's obviously what users are talking about. It's not an emulator, but as it's name suggests, it's a 'command interpreter'. Think of it as the text based interface to Windows. Now, luke, when you say "DOS prompt" what exactly do you mean? How are you getting to this prompt? This might have something to do with why you're having problems.

Read this: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/proddocs/ntcmds.asp

You get the "DOS prompt" in XP by going to the Start Menu: Select All Programs Select Accessories Select Command Prompt

Read your sentence Dr. Nick: "Of course XP does not contain MS-DOS, and good riddance I say," Emulator/Interpreter what's the diffs, he is still not going to do what DOS used to do. And being a public forum the term "what the crap" is somewhat inappropriate... or perhaps this is common terminology int he good ole US!

This being a public forum, I don't see any problems using the phrase "what the crap". I don't know about other parts of the world, but last I checked, 'crap' is an acceptable replacement for certain other words. As to my comment about DOS, almost anything you could do with the old MS-DOS you can do with the command interpreter (cmd.exe) that comes with XP. The only differences arise due to slight changes in the way various commands work, and that older MD-DOS applications will not always work with CMD.