Whirlpool

Hi,

Currently working at a mid sized company as a IT Support Officer, primarily based on their Computer Services helpdesk.

As part of my recent performance review, it was agreed that I should study for and obtain some IT industry certification. We agreed on the Microsoft Certified Professional route, and my manager suggested that I should first do a general exam such as the 70-210: Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional.
Since I am already familar with and have a good knowledge of this operating system and its what we use as our SOE at work.

Anyways, cutting to the chase...
How many of you out there have studied/done this exam?
How did you go about preparing for and studying for the exam?
Did you attend a proper training course? Or learn from a Book/Self paced learning kit?
What online study options are available?
At this stage i'm looking at purchasing (thru work of course!) the MS Press book/kit called: MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional, Second Edition.
Its $100 at Angus and Robertson bookstores.
I don't mind Classroom courses, but they are pretty expensive and generally seem to try and jam alot into a short amount of time.
I will probably have to convince work to put me into a coulple of these sorts of courses if I continue down the MCSE/MCSA track however.

Your thoughts and answers to some of my questions would be much appreciated.

regards,
Brayza.

I did 270 a couple of months ago self study, I got the MCSE DVD set from Learnkey and when I was ready booked a test time through VUE sat the test and got 889.

The DVD is a video style trainer with some hands on (Lab) stuff.

Get the full set and save some cash, after all, you know you want to. In-house training for the cores is recommended.

Delta

Marcus Bray writes...

Since I am already familiar with and have a good knowledge of this operating system and its what we use as our SOE at work.

But remember whats in your SOE may not be standard for Windows, so don't presume.

Also IIRC it goes into RIS and such which you may not be familiar with.

Just because it's XP Pro and you do allot with XP Pro, doesn't mean that much for this exam. There will be many parts it asks about that you probably don't know.

I don't mind Classroom courses, but they are pretty expensive and generally seem to try and jam allot into a short amount of time.

And generally you need study materiel such as the books above, so I would go books and then look elsewhere if needed.

There are also a number of good (and allot of bad) online courses aswell. Many of these use videos and such so are like a classroom except you cant ask too many questions.

The best tips I can offer are here:

index.cfm?a=wiki&tag=mic...ft_certification

Thanks for your replies people.
Dudley - Your wiki was very comprehesive!

Seeings I'm only doing the WinXP pro exam for starters, I guess i don't need these VMware/Virtual server products as they are for the Windows Server series OS'es right?

Hellman - I wasn't presuming anything. Just thinking that it might be a good starting exam to do, given its the OS we use at work. Alot of my existing experience with it comes from personal use/situations outside of this workplace.
But yeah, I'm sure there will be alot of stuff i don't know and have to learn before sitting this exam.

regards,
Brayza

Marcus Bray writes...

Seeings I'm only doing the WinXP pro exam for starters, I guess i don't need these VMware/Virtual server products as they are for the Windows Server series OS'es right?

I guess it depends on whether you have a spare machine available that you can install Windows XP on and complete your exercises. Just FYI, in the MS Press book Microsoft recommend: 300MHz processor, 128MB RAM, 1.5 GB hard disk space and cd/dvd rom. So the spare machine doesn't have to have much grunt (although the minimum specs will probably run pretty slowly).

If you only have one PC then downloading one of the free virtual pc applications will allow you to install a separate instance of Windows XP and you can "play" to your hearts content and it won't affect your current install at all.

Marcus Bray writes...

Seeings I'm only doing the WinXP pro exam for starters, I guess i don't need these VMware/Virtual server products as they are for the Windows Server series OS'es right?

I would still get VMWare and use it as you will be installing and reinstalling Windows XP throughout your studies (or you should anyway). Learning such things as unattended installs, sysprep, and basically being able to create new virtuals quickly when you trash other ones is very handy. Also you may at times need to run mulitple virtuals to do certain networking exercises.

I did mine by reading the MS Press book specified above + 1-2 yrs of similar experiance.
Was pritty easy, didnt bother with setting up a XP machine to practice on as all the excercises i had done in day-to-day work.
If work isnt paying for your txt book, ill sell mine if you want it.

lol! Nah, work is paying for the book.

This VM-Ware stuff sounds alright, although I'm sure work have a decent enough PC floating about.

Would my current PC (at home) be good enough to run VMware productively tho?
Its only an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, 512MB of RAM machine.

regards,
Brayza

Marcus Bray writes...

Its only an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU, 512MB of RAM machine.

Chuck in another 1Gb of RAM if you an afford it, otherwise at least another 512mb.

If you can put another hard disk in to run the VM's off you will have better performance than sharing your existing OS/Apps disk, but you can get away without it.

Hi has any one used this book for study if so do they think it's better then the MS press books.

www.angusrobertson.com.a...0782144527&db=au

also any recommendations for a 70-284 book?.

thanks woodie

woodie writes...

Hi has any one used this book for study if so do they think it's better then the MS press books.

You should check out the reviews on Amazon.com, and view some sample pages there to see if it looks like its written in a style you will like.

Hellman109 writes...

Also IIRC it goes into RIS and such which you may not be familiar with

RIS was a major part of mine... if you really want to learn about it, I recommend setting up a 2000/2003 domain and build a workstation via RIS.

I totally suggest using VMWare. You can download VMWare server for free and set it up.

Cheers,
Lee

by the way Vista is coming out soon, wouldn't studying MCP is waste where you would have to do the test again for vista, before you can be MCSE

I am currently using the patented Dudley Self Study Method for my MCSE ... MS Press Self Training Kit & an Exam Cram Series Book with VMware .. hopefuly this is enough to pass the MCSE exams in ~6 months studying 15 hours a week?

wouldn't studying MCP is waste where you would have to do the test again for vista,

I assume there will be an upgrade path ?

Sniper writes...

by the way Vista is coming out soon, wouldn't studying MCP is waste where you would have to do the test again for vista, before you can be MCSE

No it is not a waste. Proceed with your studies and attain the MCSE certification if you want to be certified. It is still the current certification and the release of Vista doesn't instantly invalidate it. Companies will be using XP and Server 2003 for years yet, just as some are still using NT4 and Windows 2000 Active Directory environments. Your certification is valuable as long as the market still uses the product, which is a long time.

There will be an upgrade path to whatever new certifications are created for Vista and Longhorn Server. Microsoft has indicated the MCSE title will not be what that certification is called, but I don't know if they've nailed doesn exactly what it will be (something like the MCITP stuff you can do now for SQL 2005 etc).

Organisations aren't going to hop onto Vista from day one or even year one. I worked in a company (about 400 desktops) that until last year ran NT4 on their desktops.

What is interesting about it?

Dudley writes...

No it is not a waste. Proceed with your studies and attain the MCSE certification if you .

Oh noooo... hehe .. currently I am studying toward my MCSE 2000 :) I have booked my 5th exam next month :) and Security+ on December this year.