The Windows command prompt is a great tool to get things done faster, and in the past we have shown you several useful commands and tools for the Windows command prompt. That said there are Windows provides several built-in commands which are quite useful. In this post we will look at some of the most useful command prompt tools.

We have confirmed that these commands work in both Windows Vista and Windows XP.

systeminfo – Ever wanted to see you system properties without having to use a GUI, the systeminfo command will come in handy to you. This command will fetch information like OS Name, OS Manufacturer, system information, hardware information, hotfix(s) applied to your PC and network card information.

tasklist and taskkill – Think of these commands as a command line task manager, you can easily view and close applications using these tools without having to use your mouse. You can either kill a application using the image name or process id for any given process. For example taskkill /IM firefox.exe will kill the instance of Firefox, to kill using the process ID you will have to use the /P switch, for example taskkill /P 1234.

ipconfig, netstat, ping, tracert and nslookup – These commands will help you debug and view network information related to your Ethernet cards, as well allow you to ping and trace any websites.

The ipconfig command shows you information about your Ethernet and wireless cards, netstat can be used to view the open network connections. ping on the other hand is useful to see if a website is online or not, tracert traces the network packets being sent and received website and nslookup can be used to see the name servers for any given websites.

If you are looking for more commands, visit Watching the Net’s top 10 windows built-in command line tools.