Overdoing it??

BobbyZ_UK

Hi Guys

I'm looking for a bit of reassurance here...

I'm hoping to sit my A+ exams (both H/W and O/S) in a few weeks time and despite the fact I've read my Wave Technologies Study Manuals and made pages of notes; watched and made notes on the CBT Nuggets videos; read and made notes after reading the excellent ExamCram2 Training pack, I'm still not sure whether I've got what it takes to pass.

I understand pretty much everything I've studied and am managing to average 70-80% on the Preplogic exams but as this will be my first ever IT exam I want to be sure before I spend £200 only to fail the exams.

I feel as though I'm ready but then I come across a question like "how many pins has a socket 7 processor" and then I realise that if I get asked loads of these type of questions then I'm goosed. Questions like what size is the L1 cache on the xxx processor causes me problems too.

Is it likely they'll ask loads of these type of questions or is a basic understanding all that is required?

Yours in anticipation

Bobby Z (UK)

Webmaster

Chances are slight you even get one of those very in-depth type of questions like how many pins a cpu has. You seem to be well prepared by using proper material. I would suggest you take some more (free) practice exams and continue with Preplogic untill you score about 90% everytime, to increase the chance you'll pass and at least as important, to be more confident.

trick000

Well your braver than I am for taking both at the same time. Why not just take the exams separately?

bellboy

the closest question you will get to "how many pins on such-and-such cpu?" will be matching cpu to the various sockets/slots -

which cpu will fit in a socket 7 motherboard? (choose two)

a) celeron 667

b) pentium p200 mmx

c) athlon 600

d) pentium p133


as far as the differing sizes of cache on cpu, basically all you need to know here is that celeron and duron processors have less cache than the pentiums and athlons of equivalent mhz, and generally know that cache can have a greater bearing on computer performance than system memory.

some literature i had for a+ had lead me to believe that i needed to know form factors, bus speeds, supported memory types, etc of pentium motherboards and chipsets, when basically it just boiled down to knowing which types of cpu normally went with which kinds of ram (486: 30 and 72 pin ram (usually parity or fast page); pentium: 72 pin edo (sometimes ecc) and moving towards 66mhz 168 pin; pii and up: 168 pin (66mhz until approx 500mhz cpu, then pc-100, with pc-133 arrived around the time of 1ghz cpu). as well as the approx time of usb support and usb as standard.

Webmaster

So kinda what your are saying is that you have to be able to recognize and identify CPU types and I'm quite sure nobody identifies a CPU by counting the number of pins I want to do a rewrite on the CPU and Sockets TechNote when the new objectives take effect... should I even include the number of pins? I think a picture might do better...

RussS

More along the lines of what CPUs are in each form factor rather than the pin numbers I would think. I remember getting a question much like bellboy describes - socket 7 / socket 1 / socket 370 or whatever.