which is harder?

lynxsr8

which is harder hardware or OS? why?

lancebukkake

i took both at the same time and passed.

i thought the OS was harder - i've been working on computers for a while so studying the hardware was just review...as for the OS, im more of a "i can remember how to do it if i can see the windows and icons" type of guy. i had to basically close my eyes and picture how to do "whatever" from memory...make sure you study on printers, IRQ, what applets are unique to each OS, know your device manager, ram banking. but for me the OS was harder.

also this site helped me out big time before the test.

skully93

I agree. The OS wasn't so bad except remembering all the little aspects of windows you hardly use, and how to get to them in Win9x and 2k/XP, but there were little things like files you forgot existed, and what do they do?

The hardware was also pretty familiar, but remembering IRQ and DMA was a challenge. My experience jumped from the TRS-80 days to Plug and Play era, so I didn't have a lot of experience manually assigning resources.

I took both, one right after another, and did OK, so you can too.

pcgrunt

I am having a hard time remembering the processor bus widths and bus speeds, as well as the SCSI bus widths and bus speeds. How much of this is on the hardware test? Did you take the new test or the older one?


Thanks for any help you can provide. I am getting ready to take the core hardware test soon.

TeKniques

I found OS to be slightly harder even though I scored higher on it than the Hardware. The reason no doubt was that I studied harder for the OS and installed all the recommened OS's multiple times on my test machines at home.

Make no mistake about it, hands on practice is the best preparation for the OS exam IMO. Good luck.

Gawd

I guess it depends on the person. A person in my class told me he found the Core Hardware exam harder then OS. Personally, I found it the other way around. Most stuff was pretty common sense on the Hardware exam (Except for some questions on stuff id never seen before. )

I didnt get any questions ( that I remember ) on DMA's, got a few questions on IRQ and I/O Address. Luckily I manage to make myself remember the important ones before I took the test.
for I/O you only really need to know for the Com ports. and for IRQ, you should know the Com ports, LPT1 and 2, IDE Controllers and RTC.
Just going from what was on my exam.

-Gawd