I had a quick look today on newly released Windows 7. Seems like two oldest Windows games are still there without any significant changes, apart from updated graphical styles.

Since it is difficult to find a working hardware old enough to run Windows 3.1, I’ve used Sun’s VirtualBox to run it. As expected, booting time is much faster than in was on IBM PC with 286 processor inside, it takes around 2 seconds to load MS-DOS and less than 2 seconds to load Windows (it was basically an MS-DOS application which was loaded from command line, not an operating system as we know it today).

Here how they looked back in Windows 3.11, released back in 1993:

And the same two games shipped with Windows 7, released 16 years later:

MS Windows has a nice little utility called forfiles. It allows to to process files based on their creation date and other parameters. If you want to clean your temporary directory from old files and folders you can use the following batch file:

Clean.bat:


cd %1
forfiles /p "." /s /c "cmd /c if @isdir==FALSE echo del @file & del @file" /d -9
for /f "tokens=*" %%d in ('dir /ad/b/s ^| sort /R') do rd "%%d"


Now all you have to do is to execute batch script:

Clean.bat C:/My_temp_dir/


If you don’t have forfiles utility installed, you can get it here

In case your windows command prompt is disabled and you are getting the following message:

The command prompt has been disabled by your administrator.
Press any key to continue . . .

You can make it available by changing registry value “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\System”, “DisableCMD” to “0″ (zero).

If your “Run…” option is hidden in start menu or you are unable to navigate to UNC path (e.g. “\\servername”) change the following registry setting to “0″:

“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer”,”NoRun”

Additional information and key can be found here.