This time, 70-293's going down

After a few more weeks of studying, I feel ready for another shot at 070-293. I'm taking it on Sunday afternoon - I learned my lesson, no more MS exams for me first thing in the morning - my mind just isn't in the mode to comb through the questions.

I labbed a lot more this time. Last time, I said I labbed as best I could, which wasn't entirely true. I sort of glazed over clustering, NLB, and PKI because it was a pain to set them up right, but I spent a good week setting up several VMs and a virtual SAN with openfiler, and have a pretty awesome virtual cluster going.

I feel great about it this time!

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Comments

citinerd

Good luck on Sunday, can't wait to see the I passed comments.

By the way where do you live that has testing centers open on Sundays?

Devilsbane

Good luck!

arwes

Best of luck to ya!

jmritenour

citinerd wrote: »

Good luck on Sunday, can't wait to see the I passed comments.

By the way where do you live that has testing centers open on Sundays?

I live near the DC Metro area. Only 1 testing center I know of that's open on Sundays, Knowledge Center Inc, in Ashburn. It's where I go most of the time, just because I find Sunday afternoons to be a relaxing, mellow time to take a test.

Dakinggamer87

Good luck!!

jmritenour

Failed again!

I'm frustrated - this time I felt pretty good. When I ended the exam, I felt like it was a pass.

The score sheet identified RRAS and availability as my big weak areas. RRAS, sure, but I felt like I answered the RRAS questions thrown at me correctly. Same with availability. There were only a handful of questions I felt like I truly didn't have a clue. That makes this fail pretty frustrating.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do at this point. I might move on to 70-294 and 70-298, the come back to 70-293. Or maybe I'll move onto the MCITP track. I dunno. I need to take a few days and think things through.

I wholeheartedly believe no one should be able to call 70-291 "The Beast" without having sat for this one.

earweed

Sorry to hear about your bad luck. I'd recommend labbing the hell out of your weak areas and nailing this monster next time. Coming back later wil be more difficult. Either knock it out or don't do it at all.

kamikaze_worm

jmritenour wrote: »

Failed again!

I wholeheartedly believe no one should be able to call 70-291 "The Beast" without having sat for this one.

Couldn't agree more mate. I took 291 dreading it on its rep and got a conftable pass however i failed 293 first time with just over 600. What was your score?

Don't beat yourself up too much. I recently failed 297 for 3rd time but have my 4th attempt booked for friday week! As people have said to me dust yourself off, study the areas you strugle with and go again. Failure is only giving up.

Kamikaze_worm

jmritenour

earweed wrote: »

Sorry to hear about your bad luck. I'd recommend labbing the hell out of your weak areas and nailing this monster next time. Coming back later wil be more difficult. Either knock it out or don't do it at all.

I'll take that into consideration, but quite frankly, I'm bored with the 70-293 subject matter at this point. Ever since I knocked CCNA out in early January, I've been reading up about clustering, NLB, RRAS enough to make my eyes bleed.

I think 294 plays more to my strengths - directory services - and I love messing with AD, so I'd actually have fun labbing it.

Failing the same exam twice has shook my confidence a bit, and I think going out and passing something I *know* I'm very good with would help me get my groove back, just like Stella did.

arwes

I know how you feel about failing twice, I got fed up with the first iteration of Security + with its horribly worded questions. I still maintain that English is a secondary language for whoever worded those things. Plus I had a 200 mile round trip for each attempt, so I had a looong drive to think about everything. Now, I'm not going to bother taking it again until I start WGU.

Personally I would love to skip the MCSE and just upgrade to MCITP:EA, but in my area Windows Server 2003 still pretty much reigns supreme. And the local HR drones have their keywords, but MCITP:EA hasn't made it to their vocabulary for the most part. We're going to 2008 R2 later this summer, but we're still stuck with a voice mail server and building security software on a couple of Windows 2000 machines.

I'm going to try my best to get my retake for 293 (still got the second shot) by the middle of March. This material is soooo dry, and since it's stuff that I never deal with on a daily basis I'm having trouble with retention. I got the 70-293 lab manual in the mail yesterday, and I'm about to log in at home to start getting my lab configured. I love hands on work.

jmritenour

Well, a giant monkey wrench was thrown in my plans for studying and moving forward the other night when my wife was hospitalized with her water breaking and starting to leak about 6 weeks early. Looks like my daughter's impatient like me and wants to get out of there.

This is a reminder that all this stuff I've been working on for the past couple of years, all these certifications don't mean anything in the long run. Sure, they can help me get a better job, or more money, but they don't count toward anything that matters. Passing 70-293 wouldn't help my wife, or my daughter. And failing it didn't hurt them.

So, I'm stepping away from the books for a bit to take care of my family. I'm not the least bit worried - I absolutely have faith that God will take care of us, and the hospital we're at has a great pre/neonatal team, so we're in good hands.

Good luck to everyone struggling like 70-293, and one day, I'll get it done.

earweed

Congrats on the new addition!
The test will be there after you get a few good nights sleep (several months down the road, probably...lol)

N2IT

The test is nothing compared to what you just got.

Congratz

kamikaze_worm

N2IT wrote: »

The test is nothing compared to what you just got.

Congratz

Congrats! What he said...