need help please studying for exams on next Monday

Indi

I am studing all over the place and i find it hard to get focused at this point. Where should i focus my attention for the exam? Printers, IRQ's, Portables.....help!

reloaded

I don't think you can focus on only one area...you need an overall knowledge on all the objectives to pass the exam. I (and I'm sure most people here) had a little bit of everything on the test. Sorry I couldn't help further, but that's the reality of cert testing. Good luck with your studies, just make sure you have a good all around knowledge and you'll be good to go.

JohnRedcorn

most people including me get hit on troubleshooting printers a lot. Know all type of printers and how to troubleshoot them. The core exam isn't too bad but watch out for the OS!

Plantwiz

Indi wrote:

I am studing all over the place and i find it hard to get focused at this point. Where should i focus my attention for the exam? Printers, IRQ's, Portables.....help!

Well, what type of experience do you have working with systems? Perhaps reschedule the exam until you are able to get your hands on more parts to break/fix/break/fix again.

A+ covers a general knowledge of many computer/OS concepts. It is testing what the average person will use in a work day/week/month??

Certainly, not every technician will ever see everything. Ask around, how many people recall using (or still use vampire taps?? ). Determining if the exam is 'hard' or 'easy' really comes down to how famiiliar you are with the material.

I will bet (if I were a betting person) that if you were to ugrade ram in a variety of boxes for only a week, you'd run into a number of issue to make you comfortable with either answering or knowing where to find the answer quickly.

Relax and practice. If you need more time, do not hesitate to consider adjusting the date. Frankly, I found the test easy, but I don't say that too often (usually comment that it was 'fair') because when I sat for the exam, I had worked with system for years.

Best of luck!

If you have specific questions - Post them in the forum and we'll all try to help you out as best we can

Transatlantic

You will get a little bit of everything thrown at you on the test, unfortunately you'll have to learn some of it till you can repeat it without thinking, like your IRQ's and things like that. They also seem to love to test on the stages of the laser printing process as well, from what I understand.

Otherwise I found a few tricks to learning some of the material you can apply to what you do everyday, sounds goofy I know, but when you're at the store have a look at the bar code scanner, how's it attached (USB, Serial). That and keep taking as many different practice tests as you can.

Also take a look at the exam objectives from Comptia, they give you the percentage values that comptia assigns to each section. Taken as a rough guide this helped me to divide up my study time on each area.