Bit off more than I can chew?

Background; 50 year old lotus notes developer/application support guy needing to retool myself yet once again. I've been doing more and more support work but mostly application support with some help desk type of support thrown in here and there. Company is small so the word Enterprise has never been in my vocabulary. Doing a roll out of Windows 7 meant running around the office over a weekend configuring our 2 dozen workstations. We use 2003 & 2008 servers but that's only so we can run Domino servers on top of them... You get the idea.

I'm taking classes at my local CC this Spring and the first covers 70-680 & 70-685. Being painfully aware of my real world inadequacies I just built a whitebox to use as a virtual lab. I'm in the process of configuring (lots of learning going on) a Win 2008 R2 server and a couple of Win 7 Pro clients.

For those of you, younger more savvy types what think you? I need some mental support here as I'm starting to feel overwhelmed reading all these tales of woe as to the difficulty of these exams. What additional "free" sources of information would you gurus point me to.

Appreciate any guidance and words of wisdom,
Mike

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kriscamaro68

This site will be a huge help as long as you use it. Also another good free source is: Professor Messer's Free Microsoft 70-680 Certification Training | Professor Messer - CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, Certification Training

Also dont forget that CBT Nuggets has the 24 hour cram sessions you can get. It cost money but at $24 its pretty affordable: CBT Nuggets

swild

I have passed only the 680 exam and I have to say that the Windows 7 Inside Out Deluxe Edition was all I needed. I have the 2011 edition. Always try and get the latest editions when it comes to MS books. I also have the Server 2008 R2 Training Kit but haven't cracked that one open yet.

DreadJunior

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

This site will be a huge help as long as you use it. Also another good free source is: Professor Messer's Free Microsoft 70-680 Certification Training | Professor Messer - CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, Certification Training

Also dont forget that CBT Nuggets has the 24 hour cram sessions you can get. It cost money but at $24 its pretty affordable: CBT Nuggets

+1

i'll add up Windows 7 Free Training on that.

mcitp_guru

I take is these will be your first microsoft certs? If you take you time and put a good amount of study in I reckon you'll be fine. 70-680 is not a hard exam, but if i was you i'd over study it and see what result you get, that way you'll get a good feel for the microsoft exam style. CBT nuggets are good! also check out what TestOut.com have to offer as i've had good results using their stuff in the past.

joshmadakor

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

This site will be a huge help as long as you use it. Also another good free source is: Professor Messer's Free Microsoft 70-680 Certification Training | Professor Messer - CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, Certification Training

Also dont forget that CBT Nuggets has the 24 hour cram sessions you can get. It cost money but at $24 its pretty affordable: CBT Nuggets

This is really really good. Supplement it with Microsoft Press book and its practice questions, as well as any other practice questions that you can find. Use the practice questions to identify areas to further study. Don't give up. The 680 is huge and covers a lot, if you don't understand something, just lab lab lab until you do. Good luck!

P.S. You can't really (easily) lab BranchCache and DirectAccess, but the Messer videos do a good job of explaining these concepts

demonfurbie

also this book is nice

http://www.amazon.com/MCTS-70-680-Cert-Guide-Configuring/dp/0789747073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326838790&sr=8-1