Re: Missing items in XP

Patrick Keenan wrote:
"Bruce Barbour" <bbarbour@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:lIOYg.153505$R63.61547@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Patrick Keenan wrote:
"Bruce Barbour" <bbarbour@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:l%zYg.142741$1T2.131739@xxxxxxxxxxxx
WindowsXP Home edition installed and updated. However, when I had some difficulty with Thunderbird e-mail program, ISP asked me to ping a site and ping was not recognized as a command. Same thing with ipconfig. What's happened? Everything else I'm running works fine. Isp man told me I had lost essential tools in XP. How can I restore them without a complete new installation? Tnx
This is usually a result of the PATH statement being incorrect. It's a minor issue and a pretty easy fix. Reinstallation is *not* necessary.

You can confirm this by opening a command prompt, changing to the windows\system32 directory, and running commands such as ping. They should run from there, since that's where they are, and that will verify that they are in fact still there.

To fix the problem, right-click on My Computer and choose Properties. Click on the Advanced tab and then the Environment Variables button on the bottom. The Environment Variables window will open. In the lower pane, click on the Path variable and choose Edit. Make sure that the system32 folder is listed. Here's part of the path on mine:

%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;

Once this is done, click Apply and OK back to the desktop. You might possibly need to reboot to have this take effect.

HTH
-pk
Thanks, Guys. Pat, followed your instructions but there was no "apply" box. User variables were Temp C:\documents and settings\Bruce Barbour and Tmp the same?. Under Comspec in the window was C:\WINDOWS\system32.exe\cmd.exe. When I changed to windows\system32 directory, ping was there ok. What seems to be the problem is that CMD exe opens the user variable C:\WINDOWS\Documents and Settings\Bruce Barbour directory and ping was not there. Do I need those user variables? Thanks for your help, a great relief.

Once the path is set properly in that section, it takes effect system-wide (though you might need to restart). For those utilities to be available in other directories, you do need to have the PATH statement there and include the %systemroot%\system32 folder (this usually will be visible at a command prompt as "c:\windows\system32"). At any command prompt, if you type PATH you will see the current path. If the system32 folder isn't in it, you won't have access to its utilities. Just add the line as described previously.

HTH
-pk


Thanks Pat, with minor amount of adjustment, got it right this time. Thanks again!!!
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