Study habits - Motivation - Study Material - Home setup

thecleaner

Morning,

I am embarking on my 2003 MCSE cert I have been reading this board for a while and have found it very useful, so hopefully I will get some feedback from this post. I have a few questions about the following; Study habits - Motivation - Study Material - Home setup


1. As most of us are working or in college what would your study habits be?

I will probably be doing 2 hours a night during the week (Mon - thurs) then 3 hours on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday. So lets say 14 hours a week, how would this fair against your regime?

Do you do a chapter, then do the transenders and then some questions, what works best for you? Do you try and make notes from the chapters or is this a waste of time cause of the amount of material!?!?!


2. What motivation do you use to study?

My first would obviosuly be to be more confident in work with the knowledge I gain from these exams, the ability to answer questions without having to run off to google.com half the time.

Other motivations would obviously be a better job, more responsibility and more money!

3. I currently have the MS press books and CBT nuggets from the year 2003, would these be out of date or still useful? Did you pay for your transenders and what site did you get them from?


4. I have an XP machine with a gig of RAM, I have VMware installed and plan to have at least three servers and 6 or 7 workstations running from this.

Would this be enough?


Thanks in advance for any replies to this post!

Brian [/b]

Sie

thecleaner wrote:

Morning,

1. As most of us are working or in college what would your study habits be?

I will probably be doing 2 hours a night during the week (Mon - thurs) then 3 hours on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday. So lets say 14 hours a week, how would this fair against your regime?

Do you do a chapter, then do the transenders and then some questions, what works best for you? Do you try and make notes from the chapters or is this a waste of time cause of the amount of material!?!?!

Personally the time I study can vary from day to day. Sometime I can study for 5-6 hours a day and sometimes not at all during the day due to other issues/commitments.

I always try and get in at least 2 hours study in a night, it doesnt always work but when working 12 hour days you dont always want/have time to do anything with kids to bath etc etc.

I would like to have a more structered study plan but life doesnt currently permit it so have to do the best I can.

As for how I study? I usually tend to read the chapter then watch the CBT Nuggets on it and then move onto the next chapter. (I also sprinkle in lab work but this has no defined pattern except when I see something that makes me think or I want to look further into)

I do however make notes from both the book and Transenders, I find that i note down things that I didnt know or understand and by putting them into my own words I understand them better.

thecleaner wrote:

2. What motivation do you use to study?

My first would obviosuly be to be more confident in work with the knowledge I gain from these exams, the ability to answer questions without having to run off to google.com half the time.

Other motivations would obviously be a better job, more responsibility and more money!

My main motivation for study is to better myself, and I enjoy to learn.

I guess its that old cliche of having a thirst for knowledge, plus it can bug me when i dont know something and I have to go find out. (Which I have to do more than I would like )

Any extra money and better work is always a bonus thou

thecleaner wrote:

3. I currently have the MS press books and CBT Nuggets from the year 2003, would these be out of date or still useful? Did you pay for your transenders and what site did you get them from?

If you can afford it get the new ones they will be more up to date. I havent seen the older ones so maybe they will suffice, hopefully someone who has used the books can advise you.

thecleaner wrote:

4. I have an XP machine with a gig of RAM, I have VMware installed and plan to have at least three servers and 6 or 7 workstations running from this.

Would this be enough?

In short, no.

Basically to run each machine you need to concider a few things.

Host Machine: Hard Disk Space & Memory Required
(processor etc do count but less important than these two)

Then for each machine you need to also take into account:
Virtual Machine: Hard Disk Space & Memory Required

So this translates to a Host Machine Running XP ustilising 256MB of RAM and a Virtual Machine Running XP utilising 256MB of RAM utilising 256MB of RAM will require a PC with 512MB of RAM.

You can run XP with lower than 256MB of RAM but I wouldnt it runs like a snail!

Hope this helps, its only a brief overview so any other questions give us a shout!

[Edited Spelling (again) /edit]

Mishra

Nice post Sie

1. As most of us are working or in college what would your study habits be?

I really base my study habits entirely into school, then when I feel like it on the side I do FUN stuff like make Linux boxes. Now that I'm out of school I study more theory than in the past.

2. What motivation do you use to study?

There are some good topics about this in the various boards. I basically think of life as a video game and try to play the game as best as I can. If I enjoy soaking hours into baldurs gate then I should enjoy soaking hours into my life.

3. I currently have the MS press books and CBT Nuggets from the year 2003, would these be out of date or still useful? Did you pay for your transenders and what site did you get them from?

2003 MS press books should be fine. I don't use training videos or transcenders

4. I have an XP machine with a gig of RAM, I have VMware installed and plan to have at least three servers and 6 or 7 workstations running from this.

Would this be enough?


a gig of RAM wouldn't take care of that at all. You need about 4 gig to do things comfortably.