Enabling the Windows 7 Telnet Client

About a week ago I decided to install Windows 7 Ultimate on my work-workstation. The reason being that there was a nice little Hyper-V Snap-In that was only available for Windows 7 / Server 2008. Yes, it was finally time to turn in XP.

Fast forward to today: I was looking into some mail NDR's being delivered to my Administrator account. To figure out who was to blame I opened a command-prompt and tried to launch the Windows telnet client to connect to their mail-server and interpret their EHLO response. However, the response I received was this:

'telnet' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Well, it turns out that by default the telnet client is not installed. However, it only takes a few steps in order to make it available and the installation disc is not needed. Those steps are:

1. Open the Control Panel (through start menu or Run Command: control)
2. Open the Programs and Features item
3. Select "Turn Windows features on or off" item on the left-hand side of the window
4. Check the Telnet client box
5. Click OK

Once that's completed you will need to reboot and will have access to the Windows Telnet client once more.