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If you type any of these in at the command prompt, you will be brought up with the help files on the machine.  I would read these and learn what all the switches do.  The ones that you will use most often and that I will talk about will be netstat, nbtstat, tracert and ping.  The others I doubt you will find useful in your situation.  Those who like to flame, this ain't hacking - its a guide to just some of the useful tools that you can use, of course, you already knew that.

netstat - type netstat /? for help file.  This allows you to view all TCP / UDP (TCP, the most common used, basically uses parity to check that all data that was sent has arrived, data can only be sent in very small amounts and it is the slower of the two.  UDP, this just sends the data and doesn't care what happens to it.  This is much faster and data can be sent in much larger amounts) connections to your machine.  It will give the host name and port they are connecting from, and the port they are connecting to you on.  netstat on its own will display all that information with hostname.  If you add the switch -n it will display all the information with IP addresses. -a will show all connections and listening ports.   This is a quick and easy way to get ip addresses and port numbers from icq.   Icq anyone and when they respond, load up the command prompt and type netstat -n and you have their ip address and the port they are using!!!

If you wish to know more, read the help file and play around.

nbtstat - type nbtstat for the help file.  Views current NetBIOS over TCP/IP (nbt) connections. nbtstat -s will display all nbt connections using host name and nbtstat -S will display the information in IP format.  nbtstat can be used to see if a remote machine has a shared folder.  You can then connect this to shared folder and do what you wish. 

nbtstat -a <hostname> or nbtstat -A <ip_add>
You will be displayed with a table some useful information and the mac address of the network card.  If you recieve the message Host not found, it means the router or box its self you are trying to access has closed of ports 137, 138, 139. You will be looking for a folder with any name that has a hex representation next to it of <20>.   This means that the folder is shared.  So now you need to connect to it (this is just like mapping a network drive in windows explorer, but using the command prompt to do it).  Type in the following.

net use \\<ip_add>
This is what you next see - The Command completed sucessfully.
net use h: \\<ip_add>\<share_name>
This is what you next see - The Command completed sucessfully.
Next type the following:-
h:
This connects you to your new share
dir /w/p
This will display the contents of the folder. Then use your nomal dos commands to browse round the folders and files.  This will also create a mapped network drive in wondows explorer, so if you prefere gui, you can use that.

Read the help files to learn more.

tracert - resolves host names to ip address and also traces your route to that address.  Type tracert at the command prompt for help.  This is quite a nice tool, but i prefer to use something called neotrace, (www.neotrace.com) it is more friendly and contains alot more info.  I recommend getting your hands on this.

ping - to test if any machine on the net is alive.   Type ping at the command prompt for help file.  You use this to test to see if a host machine is responding.  You can also use it to "ping flood" someone, this can drains there cpu time and hammer there connection.  It also drains your cpu time so it is not really worth doing, unless you can get a group of you to all ping one machine at the same time and then you may be able to bump them off line.

There are alot of switches that come with the ping command but the one you will be most intersested in would be something like this:-

ping -t -l60000 <ip_add>
This will continually ping <ip_add> with 60000b buffer size until you tell it to stop.

The other commands you will not really find useful as they set up routes for routers and are for general nt administration, but read the help file on them if you want to know more.