70 680

parttimetechie

Getting ready to take the exam, have read Poulton's book and the Sybex book, watched all of the Prof Messer videos and done lots of labs on deployment. Trying to figure out what a MS exam is like, if it is anything like Poulton's exams?

Not feeling too confident about the exam b/c I have head such horror stories of scores.

earweed

Good luck on the exam!
I didn't take 7 and have also heard the horror stories. Just remember that it can't be that bad since a LOT of people have passed it.
MS exams aren't that bad. A collection of multiple choice questions and maybe a drag and drop or two. They are, however, quite a bit harder than the Comptia tests.

Fwoom

I've seen all of Professor Messer's videos (some twice), read Poulton's book (and the practice questions on the CD), and labbed quite a bit. I have studied about a month for this and it will be my first Microsoft exam. I'll let you know how I do tomorrow. I take the exam about 12 hours from now.

I'm quite nervous myself.

Fwoom

While I was taking the exam, I felt like I knew the material they were asking.

I was shocked to find that my score was only a 592.

parttimetechie

Ouch, sorry to hear that. That is my fear is I think I will be doing great and then fall flat on my face. Any idea what killed you , or was it just a combination of things? Are you going to retake it? Did you get some kind of voucher or did you pay full price for the exam?

Fwoom

I paid full price for the exam and I will retake it sometime later. I have a voucher, but I was saving it for the 685 exam. My two lowest scores were Deploying and Configuring Hardware and Applications. This is odd, especially for the second one because I know how to configure local group policies front to back, sharing, restrictions and permissions, etc.

I can do anything they asked in the exam, so I don't know what exactly to study for next time. I will say that questions with "exhibits" are practically freebies. Maybe you'll get lucky with lots of those.

parttimetechie

Were they all MC and a few exhibits? How are those questions freebies? Was the deploying a lot of command line material?

Fwoom

A good 15-20%-ish of the exam is knowing PowerShell/command prompt, so definitely learn that. It felt like a large portion of the exam was deployment, so I suggest knowing that in-depth. Not as many GUI based questions as I would have liked.

I had one question that asked me to choose two answers, but all the others were MC with a single answer. Exhibit questions ask something like "what would you do" or "what needs to be enabled" and on the exhibit it would be a screenshot of whatever the question was asking.

The format of the exam is really similar to the CD in Poulton's book.

parttimetechie

Powershell commands being winrm, imc and winrs? Deployment being things like what is the correct name for the answer file or more in dep like what prog would you use to add packages etc?

Are the exhibits small and hard to see, or is everything really easily recognizable? I'm glad I'm getting to talk to you, no one has said much about the exam.

Glad to know Poulton's book is like the MS exam, were the questions pretty much the same or totally different?

Fwoom

To the PowerShell question - I had one (out of two) question that matched along those lines and the other I didn't recognize.

As far as deploying, those are all things you need to know. You also need to understand deploying a VHD in-depth.

Exhibit questions are pretty obvious. You'll have no trouble with these. I only had 4 or 5 in my exam of 50 questions.

Poulton's exam is more difficult simply because of the time restriction. There's more than enough time on the real exam. The questions are somewhat similar to those on the exam and the style of questions seem similar, too.

This was my experience with the exam and it could differ from person to person depending on what questions you get.

parttimetechie

Ya, I understand it could be different, but all of the info you have given here is bound to help in the long run. Do you remember any other questions about powershell that were out there and confusing to you?

I'll have to read up on VHD's thats one topic I'm not tooo solid on.

How much time did you have for the 50 questions you got? Does the exam change question number and w/e based on pre test questions or something?

Mokilok

Know deployment and the very basics of WinRM. specifically how to perform a quickconfig on hosts for the sharing of event logs.
You don't really have to know anything about powershell except what it is and the file extension used by Powershell.
Understand all of the Server 2008 R2 technologies that relate back to Windows 7 and a lot of Group Policy settings that relate to those functions,

e.g. Branchcache, Direct Connect, etc..
Under stand power settings and UAC. UAC is not simply On or Off, make sure you understand what the different levels ACTUALLY mean. e.g. dim desktop vs no dim desktop.

There isn't too much to do with VHD's so don't waste too much time, understand what types of virtualization use VHD's and that it's a virtual hard disk that can be mounted by a physical Windows 7 machine. Understand which editions of Windows 7 can boot VHD's as a primary partition and how to do that.

Understand the difference between Bitlocker and EFS (they are both encryption but how are they different).

It's funny that with this exam I found an amazing amount of content covering technologies that related to Server R2 features that probably should have been left to 70-686 Windows 7 Administration. Never the less, It's there so you should try use the group policy settings if you can, Test it out in a virtual environment.

Had I not have a Server 2k8 R2 Domain for my house and one at work I may not have passed this exam.

parttimetechie

What specifically do I need to know about power settings? The dif between Bitlocker and EFS is bitlocker protects the whole drive with keys and TPM and stuff..do i need to know more than that?

Psoasman

Your best bet is to go through the exam objectives and practice labbing through them. Set up a Server 2008 R2 DC and a client and go through the various scenarios.

TS: Windows 7, Configuring

parttimetechie

Ya, knowing the objectives is one thing, having the specific question scenario to lab them is something different. I have labbed a great deal with Win Server 2008 R2 and Win 7, but still has me nervous.

Psoasman

You can always make up your own scenarios to practice with. Use some of the practice exams you may have and change up the scenarios.

parttimetechie

Ya, I have been digging into any and all of the applets and pages I don't normally use to try and at least get a feel for what this stuff looks like, the Prof Messer vids have been of great help to me.

simtech

70-680 is the beast. Do more lab and try to read the exam questions a few times, as they can be tricky...