If you press F8 immediately after the POST (Power-On Self Test) and before Win95 loads, or if Win95 fails to load and you reboot your machine, a menu will appear giving you several bootup options. One of these is "Command Prompt Only", which should take you directly to the DOS prompt. If this option fails to work and you are still taken to Win95, check your AUTOEXEC.BAT file in the root directory of your boot drive (normally C:). If a line in the file says "WIN", delete this line, as it is force-loading Win95 on startup even when you just want the command prompt.

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