For many a year, I've had an "automatic" backup routine on my PC. The most recent version copies my important stuff to a hard drive on the server up in the attic. The previous version (also still used for "belt and braces") copies to a large separate hard drive on the main PC.
I discovered to my horror the other day that neither of these two has been working for some time. Fortunately, nothing important is lost.
It took me a lot longer to find out why this is so. If I opened a "DOS box" (I know they aren't called that under XP, but you know what I mean) and typed almost any command, even "help", I'd get an error message. Only a very few commands worked.
The problem is that XP has moved chunks of the key stuff to C
Windows\System32 where it used to be in C
Windows\Command.
Only a little change, but XP on my machine hadn't updated the "PATH=" statement to include System32, so it can't find itself. The first line of my batch files is now a PATH= statement, and they work fine.
I wonder if I should edit that thing called AUTOEXEC.BAT?
I pass this on, in case anyone else has had the problem and is wondering what's up.