FIX not recognized as an internal or external command

Whenever I open my Emails i often found my inbox flooded with mails relating to the error “SLMGR.vbs is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file” therefore I thought of sharing a working fix with all my fellow readers who are facing this issue especially while trying to activate their Windows 7 or Windows 8 through Command Prompt which is now becoming quite a more common issue therefore I think this article will help most of the users to fix SLMGR is not recognized as an internal or external command error. So follow the below given tutorial in order to fix “SLMGR.vbs is not a recognized internal or external command, operable program or batch file”

Apart from this SLMGR Command error there are other commands also which faces the same kind of error while trying to execute them therefore here I have shared a common fix for all the commands and a special fix for SLMGR Command.

Note : Important

• First of all it is must that you should ensure that you are running the command prompt with administrative privileges i.e. Run As Admin and to do so type CMD in your start search menu and then select CMD and do a right click on CMD and Select Run As Admin as shown below in the image.

• ONLY FOR SLMGR – Always make sure that when you type any command starting with SLMGR for example SLMGR -REARM there is a single space between the dash (-) and SLMGR so always keep a check on this while executing any SLMGR command.

Common Reasons for such error:

• You are not running command prompt with administrative privileges.

• The command you have typed is not in right format i.e. command should be like SLMGR -REARM and not like SLMGR-REARM here check the space between the commands.

• ONLY FOR SLMGR – You have reached the maximum threshold of using the SLMGR command i.e. SLMGR -REARM command that provides only limited attempts.

How to fix not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file :

Permanent Solution : Common for all Commands

If you are running command prompt with administrative privileges i.e. Run as admin and the command you have typed is in proper syntax but still facing the issue then there are very likely chances that there is a path problem in your environment variables section so here below is a simple fix to add proper path in your environment variables section.

• Go to My Computer -> Perform a Right Click -> Select Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables as shown below.

• Under System Variables find PATH and Select PATH and Click on edit and Add C:\Windows\system32 at the end as shown below.

• That’s it save the settings and try executing the commands once again via Run as Admin and this time hopefully you will no longer face the same issue.

Note – Also it is important that you should know the proper PATH of the command you are executing because paths for different commands may be different.

Only for SLMGR Command:

Users experiencing this error or those who have already experienced this error are advised to go through the below given steps in order to resolve the issue and i am pretty sure after following the below steps you will no longer face the same error while running SLMGR command.

Note – Make sure to set the PATH in environment variables as suggested above and after this you can try the following fix if the above listed fix doesn’t resolve.

• Open your My Computer and Go to Local Disk (C:) i.e the drive where your Windows is installed.

• Open your System32 folder and search for a file with name as slmgr.vbs.getgenuine or something similar to this name.

• Rename that file to slmgr.vbs and Click Ok when some confirmation message pops up.

• That’s it now you can retry to run the SLMGR command and hopefully this time you will no longer face the same error.

Supported Commands:

ipconfig is not recognized, ant is not recognized, git is not recognized, ruby is not recognized, jar is not recognized, adb is not recognized, ping is not recognized, telnet is not recognized, svn is not recognized, mvn is not recognized, perl is not recognized, psql is not recognized, javac is not recognized, javac is not recognized, net is not recognized, sqlcmd is not recognized, program is not recognized as internal or external command.