Microsoft E-Learning through Technet subscription?

mctwist

Hey all, I'm thinking about getting back to studying, this time for 70-640 (for now). I have some Server 2003 experience aquired a few years back when working for a small IT shop as a jack of all trades.

Now, I'm thinking about getting a Technet subscription, as that would give me access to a boatload of software that'd be of utility for my study. It also comes with 1 E-Learning collection, the cost of which would pay for the technet subscription.

My question to you guys would be, has anyone ever used those E-Learning from Microsoft, if so, are they worth it?

spd3432

mctwist wrote: »

My question to you guys would be, has anyone ever used those E-Learning from Microsoft, if so, are they worth it?

I've attempted to use some of it. They use the element-K viewer. None of the courses are currently updated to R2 content. There is no hard-copy study material so if you want to read while traveling or something, you have to screen-scrape (cut and paste) then print. A lot of the screens with text that's displayed are flash content so you can't do a screen-scrape and have to manually re-type the text into notepad. The labs are only available when working online, not when using the offline viewer. There were days the labs were either unavailable or it took half an hour or more to open an MMC console. There isn't anything provided to tell you the components (number of servers, installed roles, IP addresses, etc) of the online labs so you can attempt to lab offline to get the same results.

I recall getting download speeds of a whopping 8kbps when trying to download some of the courses to view offline, I'm on a fiber connection and consistently have a rated download speed of close to 20mbps and an upload speed of about 5mbps.

In answer to your question, in my opinion the Microsoft e-Learning courses would not be a reason to justify the cost of a technet subscription.

Sean