Do you need telnet on your Windows 7 box?

Follow these simple steps to add the telnet command to your command line tools.

Click on “Start Button”

Click on “Control Panel (menu item)” in “Start menu”

Click on “Uninstall a program (link)” in “Control Panel”

Click on “Turn Windows features on or off (link)” in “Programs and Features”

Click in “Windows Features” box and find the “Telnet Client” check box

Allow the system to install the appropriate files – should take only a few seconds to a minute or so.

To test the functionality:

Click on the “Start button”

Click on “Search Box” in “Start menu”

Type “cmd” in the “Search box” to bring up a command prompt

Type “telnet” and hit “enter”. You should now see the Microsoft Telnet> prompt

There you go.  Easy enough.

P.S. If you can’t find the “Telnet Client” check box in your programs list, you may need to upgrade your version of Windows 7 to get these features.

For those of us out there that have been missing the telnet command on Vista, here is how you enable it on MS Windows Vista.  No reboot is required.

Telnet isn’t your only option though.  If you prefer to log in to hosts via ssh, you can simply download Putty which is a free terminal emulator that supports ssh and telnet.  I use telnet more for a troubleshooting and don’t recommend that you use it for remote log in.  It’s just not as secure.

To Enable Telnet on Vista

First step is to open your Vista Control Panel and then click the “Progams” icon.

Click on “Start”, then “Control Panel” to bring up this screen…

Next, click on “Turn Windows Features on or off”.

Click highlighted area…

Find the “Telnet Client” item and make sure it is checked before clicking “OK”.

“Telnet Client” is checked…

You will then see a progress window that won’t seem to be doing much for a minute or two,  but it will eventually start moving, so be patient.

Progress bar – wait a few minutes indeed…

Finally – we’re done…

Once the installation is finished, you now have access to the telnet command.  Just type telnet <host> in the search bar of Vista, or if you prefer, run in it from a command prompt.

The shell now doesn’t complain about not finding telnet…

I hope this was helpful. Don’t forget to check out all the other features you can turn on and off while you’re enabling telnet.