Feeler: PC & gear needed for MCITP/MCSA study

[guitargeek62]

Hi all,

I'm looking to chuck together a home client/server setup to play around with for testing, I know there's plenty of IT guys on here so if you've got anything suitable let me know. I'm looking for a full setup, nothing fancy, so hti me with what you've got.

Cheers!

[thereformant]

Isn't using physical servers for this sort of thing a bit 90s? https://www.virtualbox.org/

[meltedbuzzbox]

was gonna say just use vmware player

as long as you have a dual core cpu and 4gb of ram you should be fine unless you need to run loads of VMs

[meltedbuzzbox]

which exam are you sitting?

[guitargeek62]

Isn't using physical servers for this sort of thing a bit 90s? https://www.virtualbox.org/

Shh, it's fun to waste money!

Nah, you're right though, I guess I could run it through VM but to tell the truth, I've not had much chance to look into it yet so just went with what I'd seen from a quick perusal online!

Atm I've got a nice i5 loaded Vaio with about 8Gb ram iirc? It's back in Plym being used by the missus for Uni though so I'd have to check. I'm the worse kind of "It guy", I pay very little attention to it outside of work! I did just "upgrade" it to Win8 a few weeks back for sh*ts & giggles but I've got a few spare win7 img'd drives that I can drop in whenever I need to.

MBB; It'll be the 70-680 & 70-685 I think, maybe the 686 over the 685. Either way, the plan is to get this;

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en...ification.aspx

...and rather than forking out for training, I'll try it this way first;

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en...1&locale=en-us


Any sage words of advice are much appreciated, as ever.

[meltedbuzzbox]

Everyone one works differently but for me.

MS books are the best. The others are ok but MS seems to have the easiest material to follow and you get the quiz cds and everything bundled in as well as the OS etc.
CBT nuggets are good but I would never rely on them. They cover too much fleetingly and leave so much out at times.
Test Kings are good for the final cram, the week before you take your exam.
Technet is great for everything. The forumites are very helpful

Dont waste time on here when you should be studying ;-)

go enterprise on your exams and get some server 2008 under your belt. ;-)

[Denzilmac]

If you buy this http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0...ls_o05_s00_i00 then be aware that the errata list runs into several pages and even that doesn't cover all the errors. Pretty shocking for an official MS training publication.

I got stuck on one exercise that was just plain incorrect. It took me 3 days and numerous visits to forums etc to figure out what was wrong....