Need Help 70-680

So I took my Exam today and failed, badly.

50 question and I get 502/1000 which I assume is 25 correct. I sat down and I hit the wall instantly on the first question.

I've been using the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit to prepare for this exam and as soon as I sat down I looked at the question and thought this wasn't covered

About 20-30% of that exam was not in this training material and everything else was barely covered and not helped atall by the study guides poor chapter summaries etc.

I spent 3 months working a full time job while studying through this prep guide top to bottom. Then I wrote out almost everything from the guide I could in notes etc. Then I spent a few weeks going over the practice questions that came with the study material (200 of them) making sure I got 95%+ everytime.

Out of the 200 questions only 2/50 questions in the actuall exam where releveant to these.

Btw I have no previous work experience in IT, everything I know I have learnt from self study.

Basically I'm leaving my country next month to travel thousands of miles away, and I wanted a qualification before I got there, which gives me one month left to get this exam done.

I could really really use some advice on some good study material and not this crap I've been reading.

Any advice/help would be hugely appreciated

Regards.

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Comments

NOLAJ

Did you lab? If you don't have any IT experience, it would be crucial that you lab. MS exams are given on the premise that you have IT experience.
What training material did you use besides the MS Press Book?

Excellent1

One suggestion I would make is to actually "lab" everything. Pull up the monitoring tools and use them yourself, use diskpart to create a vhd, along with the gui, etc. In doing so you will become familiar with a lot of the secondary details that are not necessarily specific objectives, but they do seem to show up in the exam. If you just study the details on how to do something but not on how to access certain windows or details, you will miss a large part of the exam.

Basically, my take on it is that you need to have familiarity with the overall use of the OS, not just certain objectives. Make yourself a couple of VM's (Virtual PC is a free download, so there's no reason not to), and get familiar with everything you're reading about.

Also, I will say that Don Poulton's book had several things that the MS Press book didn't, but it's far from perfect. Technet is also a good resource to make use of for this exam.

Good luck with it.