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Passed A+ Core: 807

panikpanik Member Posts: 61 ■■□□□□□□□□
in A+
Hi

I Passed my A+ Core Hardware exam yesterday, with 807 marks. :D

I used Mike Myers, "all in one A+ Certification exam guide", the shiny gold one, and the vast amounts of knowledge I've gained from messing around with computers for the last 10 years...
I also read through the tech notes on this site.

I made some notes on the Exam as soon as I got home, I was suprised by the number of questions that dealt with stuff that I would consider old, obselete and a bit obscure. ie IrDA, 10Base5 and Pentium Pro's.
So just because you've never seen it, don't think that you won't get questions on it.

so here is some of the things that I came across in my exam:

The big one was troubleshooting. There were alot of questions about how to troubleshoot IDE, SCSI and Printers. This was about half of the exam.

CPUs: You need to know what CPUs use which connector, including AMD processors.
I got two Pentium Pro questions.
Pentium Pro uses Socket 8 BTW.

Cables:
You need to know the pin and cable types for IDE, floppies and SCSI.
Including the 40pin, 80 wire IDE cables and for what IDE speeds they are required for, which is UltraDMA 4, 5 and 6, ATA/66, ATA/100 and ATA/133

Networking:
Cables: You need to know the cable types and connectors for 10Base2, 10BaseT and 10Base5.
10Base5 = RG-8, 50ohms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5
10BaseT is UTP (unshielded twisted pair) and RJ-45
10base2 is BNC, T-Connectors and Co-axial
Speeds: including ISDN and dial-up.
You will need to know that Ethernet is referring to a 10BaseT LAN connection, and that T-Connectors are for 10Base2. Sometimes that is the only clue you'll get in the question about what sort of network it is referring to.

Printers:
Trouble shooting laser, dot matrix and bubble jets.
Storage of laser printer consumable. I received two questions about storage of two different types of imaging drums!
The laser printer questions seem to refer to older black and white laser printer, and don't appear to take into account newer colour laser printers.

RAM:
You need to know Speeds: i.e: 100Mhz and 133Mhz for SDRAM etc
Types: SRAM for CPU Cache, SDRAM and DDR etc
Pins: SDRAM DIMMS are 168pin etc

SCSI:
INT13h: I still don't know what this is. I think it was referring to large hard disk support. icon_confused.gif:
Speeds: you do need to know the speeds for various flavours of SCSI, i.e SCSI-3, Ultra-160 and Ultra-320
RAID: you need to know your RAID types, and how many disks are required.

Firewire: all the firewire questions refer to it as "IEEE 1394". Which seems to me to be "IEEE 1394a", 400Mbps firewire. They don't seem to refer to "IEEE 1394b", 800Mbps firewire. icon_confused.gif:

infrared: I got two questions on Infrared, IrDA. The big clue is that they both refered to using IrDA to connect wirelessly to printers. So you do need to know what it is used for, and the range (1 Metre).

I also got two questions about storage of two different types of laser printer imaging drums, I don't know if I got these right or not icon_sad.gif

Good luck with your studying, I've started studying for my OS exam now.
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