A clients PC is having problems connecting to a certain website. Which of the following tools would be used to evaluate the hops taken from the clients PC to the website?

1. NSLOOKUP 
2. IPCONFIG 
3. PING
4. TRACERT

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314868

How to Use the TRACERT Utility

The TRACERT diagnostic utility determines the route to a destination by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo packets to the destination. In these packets, TRACERT uses varying IP Time-To-Live (TTL) values. Because each router along the path is required to decrement the packet's TTL by at least 1 before forwarding the packet, the TTL is effectively a hop counter. When the TTL on a packet reaches zero (0), the router sends an ICMP "Time Exceeded" message back to the source computer.

TRACERT sends the first echo packet with a TTL of 1 and increments the TTL by 1 on each subsequent transmission, until the destination responds or until the maximum TTL is reached. The ICMP "Time Exceeded" messages that intermediate routers send back show the route. Note however that some routers silently drop packets that have expired TTLs, and these packets are invisible to TRACERT.

TRACERT prints out an ordered list of the intermediate routers that return ICMP "Time Exceeded" messages. Using the -d option with the tracert command instructs TRACERT not to perform a DNS lookup on each IP address, so that TRACERT reports the IP address of the near-side interface of the routers.

In the following example of the tracert command and its output, the packet travels through two routers (157.54.48.1 and 11.1.0.67) to get to host 11.1.0.1. In this example, the default gateway is 157.54.48.1 and the IP address of the router on the 11.1.0.0 network is at 11.1.0.67.

The command:

C:\>tracert 11.1.0.1

The output from the command:

Tracing route to 11.1.0.1 over a maximum of 30 hops
   ---------------------------------------------------
   1      2 ms       3 ms       2 ms      157.54.48.1
   2     75 ms      83 ms      88 ms      11.1.0.67
   3     73 ms      79 ms      93 ms      11.1.0.1

   Trace complete.