Passed 271 today, got my MCDST. Here are some details....

voxic

61 questions. 125 minutes.

Used Transcender, which was JUST OK. There were some topics that Transcender helped with, but there were also many things that Transcender didn't even cover. I went to **** (.com) and looked at their demo questions. At least 5-6 questions displayed were on the MS 271 exam word-for-word. In fact on 2 questions, the only reason I got them right was because I looked at these demo questions from **** (.com) last night.

271 in my opinoin is ALOT harder than 272, even though I scored about the same.

If you don't have experience actually troubleshooting Windows XP in a multiuser environment, then you MUST, MUST study for this one. You will probably know the answers to 30%-50% of the questions by "playing" with XP, but there are topics on here that most people will never be able to know unless they are experienced or have studied the material.

-Know what all the advanced settings in the DNS properties on a network adapter are for, especially the Append suffix and REGISTER WITH DNS SERVER

-Know network printing and what issues stopping and restarting a client side print spooler will do

-Know L2TP VPN with certificates and how it applies to users

-Know basic Windows XP features like taskbar properties and what checkboxes to select to enable your Quick Launch to display all shortcuts. (You must uncheck LOCK taskbar in order to expand the Quick Launch bar)

-As always, know NTFS and SHARE permissions and how to correctly apply them
-Know the Ecrypting File system and how it works. It doesn't work with files/folders that are compressed and know what happens to EFS/Compression when MOVING or COPYING within a volume and across volumes

-There were many questions on my PRACTICE EXAMS about dynamic and basic disks, but no question about it on the MS test. There were also no questions about various backup types (i.e. differential and incremental)

-Know everything about Remote Desktop (a COMMON theme on both tests, MS is really pushing this feature)

-Know how to troubleshoot memory problems, CPU problems, and har disk problems using Task Manager, Performance Monitor. Also know what the symptoms are of a fragmented hard drive so you can use MS Defragmenter to fix. (i.e. slow program access and slow searching)


Again, I know there are more things that I didn't mention, so feel free to ask specifics and I will try my best to remember.

bighornsheep

You wrote both exams at the same time?
Was customization a big topic on 272? How about Security with IE and Outlook express?

Please share a little bit more about 272, I will be writing that soon.

Cheers,