Passed: 70-680

I disappeared off here for a couple of days to focus on studying. Passed 70-680 this afternoon. First take. 1000/1000. 50 questions, 135 minutes allowed. I completed the exam in under 30 minutes. One hell of an exam though. Microsoft workstation OS exams are always hard with lots of material covered. NT 4.0 Workstation and XP exams were no exception.

Preparation resources used:

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-680): Configuring Microsoft® Windows 7 (errors, flipped answers, wrong answers, and all)

Exam simulator that came with the book and Transcender

Reading: approx. 39-41 hours
Labs: approx. 8-9
Exam simulation hours: 3
Total prep time: approx. 50-53 hours

Next up: 70-640 on Tuesday, 7/26.

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Comments

Dr IT

Well Congrats

Guess you smashed it in to pieces

Dakinggamer87

Congrats!!

Psoasman

Congrats on your pass!

parttimetechie

That is incredible. Congratulations. Have you used many of these technologies in your day to day work?

jyrki.arpiainen

LAN_Guru wrote: »

I disappeared off here for a couple of days to focus on studying. Passed 70-680 this afternoon. First take. 1000/1000. 50 questions, 135 minutes allowed. I completed the exam in under 30 minutes. One hell of an exam though. Microsoft workstation OS exams are always hard with lots of material covered. NT 4.0 Workstation and XP exams were no exception.

Hooray!

I spend months with each exam and never ever get near to 1000.
Best score so far is approx. 875 or something.. . there's always those trick questions that i miss so even if i know topic really well i still manage to answer incorrectly few times.

And i always use all the time that there is given. Used all time even with those 240 min exams that there were in MCSE path.

First round to answer Q's with small amount of text, marking up for review rest of them and at the second round i answer longer questions...
When all questions are answered i use rest of the time to check my answers and making changes if i spot something that's incorrect.

Well, i guess that i ain't one of those GURU's out there.. . more like average guy with an obsession to get IT-career running.

LAN_Guru

Dr IT wrote: »

Well Congrats
Guess you smashed it in to pieces

Thanks!

Dakinggamer87 wrote: »

Congrats!!

Thanks!

Psoasman wrote: »

Congrats on your pass!

Thanks!

parttimetechie wrote: »

That is incredible. Congratulations. Have you used many of these technologies in your day to day work?

Thank you. I have been using/supporting Windows 7 since it was released but have not been exposed to a lot of the enterprise deployment, support, and administration technologies before.

jyrki.arpiainen wrote: »

Hooray!

I spend months with each exam and never ever get near to 1000.
Best score so far is approx. 875 or something.. . there's always those trick questions that i miss so even if i know topic really well i still manage to answer incorrectly few times.

And i always use all the time that there is given. Used all time even with those 240 min exams that there were in MCSE path.

First round to answer Q's with small amount of text, marking up for review rest of them and at the second round i answer longer questions...
When all questions are answered i use rest of the time to check my answers and making changes if i spot something that's incorrect.

Well, i guess that i ain't one of those GURU's out there.. . more like average guy with an obsession to get IT-career running.

Studies show that your first guess is usually the correct one. People who go back and second-guess themselves usually score lower than if they had left their original answers. It sounds like you spend a lot of time to thoroughly prepare for exams. Trust yourself.

I have 17 years of real-world experience. It would be extremely sad if I couldn't score higher than someone just getting started.

Don't beat yourself up...you'll get there. Just stick with it...

Thanks for the acknowlegements everyone, I truly appreciate it.