Practice test 70-680

missjanaya

Hello anyone know where I can find practice test for the 70-680 I am really looking for free ones but I am willing to pay a little. Does anyone know a good book for this exam?

maelstrom3530

I'm studying for the 70-680 (my exam is in August), and I know of these two:

MCTS 70-680 Practice Exam

http://www.mcpguide.com/mcts-70-680-practice-test-1/


But I can't vouch for how the questions compare to the actual test, as I've never taken the 70-680 or any other MS exam. I've been studying for a few weeks now. This is an exam where you're simply going to have to lab to understand things.

As far as books:

http://www.amazon.com/MCTS-70-680-Cert-Guide-Configuring/dp/0789747073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437395559&sr=8-1&keywords=Poulton+70-680

MCTS 70-680 Rapid Review: Configuring Windows 7: Orin Thomas: 9780735657298: Amazon.com: Books


Also, these videos are absolute gold for the 70-680. I only wish he had done a series for the 70-685/70-686. Anyways, free gold here!:

Professor Messer's Free Microsoft 70-680 Certification Training | Professor Messer IT Certification Training Courses

I usually don't do well simply reading books for technical training. What I usually do is watch the video and take notes. Then I read the corresponding section in the book and add to my notes anything that was left out in the videos. The Messer vids and the Poulton book correspond *very* nice. Its easy to jump between the two as the indexes are almost identical. The Rapid Review book will be good in the last week to cram (I haven't bought this one yet).

For labs, you can use virtual box, Win 7 Enterprise Evaluation and Server 2008 R2 evaluation. I think the link for Win7 Ent Eval have disappeared from Microsoft, but you can still find the ISO in other places on the web.

Buckles

Check my post for you in the other thread MissJanaya

greg9891

Thanks for the info....studying for 70-680 as well.

maelstrom3530

I came across these too, which are very good:

MS Windows 70-680 12 Hour Free Course:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkqWLB26Fzc&list=PL2552C352B8B8E11A

mcse23

Took the 70-680 exam on Monday (1st time) and failed with a score of 615. Plan to do it again in a couple weeks, but any helpful tips from anyone currently studying or recently passed will be much appreciated.

Used only exam cram by Patrick Regan and videos by Professor Messer on Youtube.
Tried some labs, but not much.

maelstrom3530

Passed the 70-680 today. It wasn't too bad but what helped me the most were was doing the labs. I had a few questions on BrancheCache that I really didn't know the answers to, just took my best guess. In my opinion the Messer videos are good but don't go deep enough into the content. I though the MS Press lab book was pretty decent actually. My best advice is to watch the Messer videos, take good notes on any topic/concept that you didn't know before. For me, writing reinforces the knowledge and helps it stick a lot better. If you're stuck on a concept that you don't understand, research it on youtube. There's a video series called "Free IT Training 70-680" that's very good, even better than Messer. Whatever I couldn't learn from Messer I learned from those videos. After the Messer/notes/followup, to the lab book. If you understand the concepts before the lab book, the labs are actually pretty easy. I even got a VPN to work, something I've never done before.

Setting up the lab is easy. The prerequisites and instructions to get the lab going are all in the appendix of the lab book. I had it all set up pretty quickly, despite having very little experience working with MS servers. You'll need to find the Win7 Enterprise ISO and Win Server 2008 R2 ISO online somewhere. Once you install them, you'll have 90 days to use Win7 and 180 days to evaluate Server 2008 R2. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft has taken down the MS Win7 Enterprise ISO from their official site, but you should be able to find these ISOs in other places. Load them up in virtualbox (from Oracle). There are some caveats, one of which I discovered with virtualbox. You'll need to add a second network card to all VMs. One network card will be connected to NAT and have full internet access. The other network card (and this is the special one, Adapter 2) you'll need to set to "Internal Network". Make sure the names of the Internal Networks match on all VMs (within the virtualbox settings). What's happening here is Vbox independently NATs all virtual machines onto their own VLAN. So in that sense, individual VMs can't communicate. That's why we have the second NIC (Adapter 2) on the (same) Internal Network. Give them all IPs (in the running VM) on the same subnet on that Internal Network and they will be able to communicate. You don't have to worry about Adapter 1 since its NAT'd, just let it roll as it is. I found this to be easier since you can just enable/disable the NICs within the VM's as needed, instead of disabling them in Vbox (which requires the VM to be powered off.) Wow this is starting to turn into a how-to, tmi.
.........
tl;dr = watch, write, re-watch, lab with virtualbox. If you get burned out, take a break.

Buckles

maelstrom3530 wrote: »

Passed the 70-680 today. It wasn't too bad but what helped me the most were was doing the labs. I had a few questions on BrancheCache that I really didn't know the answers to, just took my best guess. In my opinion the Messer videos are good but don't go deep enough into the content. I though the MS Press lab book was pretty decent actually. My best advice is to watch the Messer videos, take good notes on any topic/concept that you didn't know before. For me, writing reinforces the knowledge and helps it stick a lot better. If you're stuck on a concept that you don't understand, research it on youtube. There's a video series called "Free IT Training 70-680" that's very good, even better than Messer. Whatever I couldn't learn from Messer I learned from those videos. After the Messer/notes/followup, to the lab book. If you understand the concepts before the lab book, the labs are actually pretty easy. I even got a VPN to work, something I've never done before.

Setting up the lab is easy. The prerequisites and instructions to get the lab going are all in the appendix of the lab book. I had it all set up pretty quickly, despite having very little experience working with MS servers. You'll need to find the Win7 Enterprise ISO and Win Server 2008 R2 ISO online somewhere. Once you install them, you'll have 90 days to use Win7 and 180 days to evaluate Server 2008 R2. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft has taken down the MS Win7 Enterprise ISO from their official site, but you should be able to find these ISOs in other places. Load them up in virtualbox (from Oracle). There are some caveats, one of which I discovered with virtualbox. You'll need to add a second network card to all VMs. One network card will be connected to NAT and have full internet access. The other network card (and this is the special one, Adapter 2) you'll need to set to "Internal Network". Make sure the names of the Internal Networks match on all VMs (within the virtualbox settings). What's happening here is Vbox independently NATs all virtual machines onto their own VLAN. So in that sense, individual VMs can't communicate. That's why we have the second NIC (Adapter 2) on the (same) Internal Network. Give them all IPs (in the running VM) on the same subnet on that Internal Network and they will be able to communicate. You don't have to worry about Adapter 1 since its NAT'd, just let it roll as it is. I found this to be easier since you can just enable/disable the NICs within the VM's as needed, instead of disabling them in Vbox (which requires the VM to be powered off.) Wow this is starting to turn into a how-to, tmi.
.........
tl;dr = watch, write, re-watch, lab with virtualbox. If you get burned out, take a break.

Good post, I was wondering why I was having issues with the VirtualBox so I switched back to VMWare.

Congratulations on Passing the 680! You will most likely have more questions on BC in the 685 so familiarise yourself with it.
Goodluck with the 685. IMO, it's the harder of the two.