Advice

dredlord

Hi guys, I will be sitting the exam en of Jan 09, I am currently using the MS 290 material and CBT nuggets. I also purchase the bosson exams. Anyone can comment on how prepared one would be with such materials. As this is my fist MS exam and am quite scared to be honest.

Essendon

The 290 book is ok for this test, but I would recommend that you use something like Mark Minasi's Mastering Server 2003 as a reference. I also used the Exam Cram book which was good too. I am not sure about Boson for this test, but if it were me, I'd buy Transcender for practice tests. They are usually harder than the actual test, so getting on top of them should get you over the line on test day.

What's most important, however, is to lab it up. Throw in a couple of servers and clients each in VMware or VirtualPC, break-fix things. practice with share/NTFS permissions, performance, backups. Make sure you give yourself plenty of hands-on training, as the real aim should be to learn the material, not just pass the exam. If you lack actual work experience, labbing up is the way to go.

Post up if you have other questions, plenty of people here to help you out

Pash

Essendon wrote:

The 290 book is ok for this test, but I would recommend that you use something like Mark Minasi's Mastering Server 2003 as a reference. I also used the Exam Cram book which was good too. I am not sure about Boson for this test, but if it were me, I'd buy Transcender for practice tests. They are usually harder than the actual test, so getting on top of them should get you over the line on test day.

What's most important, however, is to lab it up. Throw in a couple of servers and clients each in VMware or VirtualPC, break-fix things. practice with share/NTFS permissions, performance, backups. Make sure you give yourself plenty of hands-on training, as the real aim should be to learn the material, not just pass the exam. If you lack actual work experience, labbing up is the way to go.

Post up if you have other questions, plenty of people here to help you out

This is tip top advice. Can't stress how important actually knowing how to do this stuff on live real world servers is. Practice and then practice some more.

Cheers,

Big Jizay

Pash and Essendon are right. Hands on is the way to go! For the 290, you have to know how to implement this knowledge on an actual server. There are several simulations of 2003 Server on the exam.

lost33cause

In my studies and practice questions it seems that spending most of your time on users/groups, permissions, backups, and storage operations. If you get those down you should be OK. I'm going to be sitting for the exam in a week or two.