Hi All,
Just took the 70-271 test today and passed.
It's actually was a pretty straight forward exam for me, although I have exp doing DST work in a Domain Environment for XP. The exp helped alot as it cut my study time down dramatically, but you can very easily pass this exam by getting hands on using XP Pro and using the study guides.
The exam was probably the fairest MS exam I have taken as the questions were for the most part evenly divided up amongst the objectives as listed on the MS Site here:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-271.mspx
The questions pretty much had obvious answers (obvious as long as you know the material).
I used only 2 books for this exam:
MCDST Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-271): Supporting Users and Troubleshooting a Microsoft Windows XP Operating Systems, Second Edition
and
Sybex MCDST: Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician Study Guide (Exams 70-271 and 70-272), Deluxe Edition
If you read, understand, retain the information in these books, and get some hands on with XP I can pretty much say confidently that you will pass the 70-271 exam.
With that said, I strongly recommend that you understand fully the following: Remote Assistance,
Device Manager (how to rollback a driver), ASR-System Restore-Last Known Good Configuration-Safe Mode (Understand how they work and when to use them), Understand how to read Task Manager (especially the Processes and Performance Tabs), Local Security Policy, Troubleshooting TCP/IP and DNS Name Resolution (know how to configure both and what the correct values should be ie invalid Subnet Masks, IP Address, ect...) Dial up and VPN, Share and NTFS Permissions,
And IE.
Of course know the other exam objectives as well too as you never know what you will come across.
I am taking 70-272 tomorrow and will post my results on that exam then.
