A+ Journal

 

Read how I went from a clueless wannabe computer technician to an A+ Certified Computer Technician!

Final test scores at bottom of page

 

5-12-99:  I am currently preparing to take the A+ exams and become a CompTIA A+ Certified Computer Service Technician.  The purpose of this journal is to record all my hands-on experience dealing with "fixing" and upgrading computers.

 

Well, before you start reading my journal, perhaps I should tell you a little about myself.  I'm 16, live near Seattle, WA, and am enrolled in a computer class.  Now, one of the major reasons I'm trying to get certified is because if I do, I get an A in the class (wow, two As for the price of one).  But another reason why I picked up that 1,018 page, 3.5" thick A+ book is because I know absolutely nothing about computer hardware.  Want to know why?  Well, it all started way back when my dad bought our first computer.  Yup, it was an NEC with an Intel 386/20 MHz CPU.  Now, my dad paid $2,000 for that computer, and he didn't know that much about computers.  In other words, he was an average computer user.  So, would you let your clueless 10 year old son tinker around with the insides of a $2,000 machine you knew hardly nothing about?  I don't think so.  Well, I still tinkered around with it, but not with the insides.  I experimented with the software side of computers.  How much extended RAM do I need to make this game run?  Oh, I need a BOOT Disk, how do I make that?  What does del *.* do? Opps.  I want to make my own game, how?  Ohhh, QBasic.  So, six years and three computers later, you have someone who knows a lot about the software side of computers and nothing about how it actually works "under the hood."

 

People of Importance:

Russell:  Friend from computer class.  Knows stuff about hardware.  Gives me extra parts.

Dad:  Person who bought $2,000 computers (value has now dropped to practically nothing).

 

Computers of Importance (BTW, I refer to them by the processors):

386:  Our first computer.  NEC, 20 MHz, 2 megs of RAM, 40 MB hard drive.

486:  Our second computer.  Clone, 66 MHz (now 100), 8 megs of RAM, 504 MB hard drive.

Pentium:  Our current computer.  Clone, 200 MHz, 32 megs of RAM, 3 GB hard drive.

 

5-11-99:  Today I attempted to install some more RAM on my old 486DX2/66 MHz computer.  This computer is about 4-5 years old, and has had no hardware problems since the day we bought it.  (Software problems, however, is something else).  Russell gave me a big bag full of RAM, which I have no idea what type they are.  I did know that they fit into my motherboard by putting them into at an angle and pushing them upright until they snapped in.  I already had one "stick" of RAM, which was 8 megs and longer than the kind Russell gave me.  I attempted to install one of the pieces of RAM from Russell and turned on the computer.  Nothing happened.  Damn RAM.  Must be broken.  I tried another.  Nothing.  Then I remembered something about installing RAM in pairs.  I tried it.  Nothing.  I wondered if I had to set some jumpers or something to tell my motherboard to detect the smaller RAM.  My dad started to wonder why I was turning the computer on and off, so I told him that I was installing some more RAM and that I needed the motherboard manual.  He got up and searched all over but couldn't find it.  I just about gave up until I remembered some notes I printed out from a website about installing RAM.  I found the paper and took a look at it.  Very simple to read and well written.  I found that my original 8 MB of RAM was a 72-pin SIMM.  72-pin SIMMs are 32-bit and 486 motherboards "talk" in 32-bit, so that's why I had only one SIMM.  The RAM that Russell gave me, however, were 30-pin SIMMs.  30-pin SIMMs are 8-bit, which means I needed four of them installed at the same time (8 bits * four 30-pin SIMMs = 32 bits).  Why didn't my A+ book tell me anything about this?  (6-5-99: I hadn't reached that chapter yet.).  I installed four SIMMs and turned on the power.  I smiled when the screen flickered and the RAM counted up.  11.9 megs total.  As it booted up I got a glance at the BIOS settings as it said 80486/DX4 with 100 MHz CPU.  I remembered that I replaced my original AMD 486/DX2 CPU chip with an AMD 586 chip that was on a motherboard Russell gave me.  "Wow, cool", I thought, "It can read the CPU speed."  I took out the 586 CPU and put my original 486 in to see what it would say.  80486/DX2 66 MHz.  However, when Window 3.11 booted up there were these black lines across the screen.  I exited to DOS and everything was fine.  I turned off the power and replaced the 486/DX2 chip back with the 486/DX4 chip. Damn Socket 3, it's a real tight fit.  I have to push on the CPU for it to go down.  I turned on the computer and nothing happened.   Dammit.  No Power On Self Test (POST) beeps or nuttin.  I took out the chip and tried to put it back in.  I did this about 10 times.  I then took out the four 30-pin SIMMs but it still didn't do anything.  I admitted defeat and put the case back on.  Hopefully my dad won't turn on the computer... it was only a $2000 machine back when he bought it (of course, its worth about $50 now...).

 

5-12-99:  Gotta fix this machine, gotta fix this machine.  Russell said that my CPU chip replacing shouldn't have done anything.  I wonder if some static electricity or something fried a chip on the motherboard when I was working on it.  I remembered that I touched the power supply and metal frame before I did anything though.  Or maybe the PC speaker was broken so it wouldn't do any POST beeps?  Nah, it beeped up all the RAM the last time I turned on the computer, so the speaker can't be broken.  Determined, I turned on the machine.  Nothing.  I took out the CPU and put it back in.  I pushed the power button.  Same thing!  But then I heard it.  Those wonderful POST beeps!  One long beep, three short ones!  I remember that three beeps had something to do with RAM, but I wasn't sure.  Knowing that I had an AMI BIOS, I went to www.ami.com and clicked on Support.  I found the POST beep codes, and sure enough, three beeps meant that the first 64K of RAM was bad.  They recommended making sure the RAM was seated properly first, and if that wasn't the problem, then go buy some more RAM.  I looked at my 72-pin SIMM.  It looked fine.  I took it out and put it back.  I turned on the computer, same thing.  I then tried my 30-pin SIMMs.  SAME THING!!!  I went to www.dejanews.com to see what other people suggested doing.  I searched for +AMI +POST +"3 beep" +RAM.  Most people just copied the troubleshooter info from AMI's website in their reply to people who had similar problems.  One guy said something about the video card being out of its slot can cause it not to boot.  Hmm, I wonder....  I went and checked out my video card.  It's a big thing, as long as the motherboard.  Hey, wait a sec, the far end of it that was slightly up!  I pushed it in and turned on the computer.  Ahhh, nothing is more gratifying than watching your monitor flicker and the RAM count up.  Of course, watching it speed quickly through the RAM and have a "CMOS setup options not set, RUN SETUP UTILITY" error instantly destroys that gratification.  I hit F1 and found that all my setting were gone!  Damn CMOS.  I wonder what caused it do that?

 

5-13-99:  Well, I briefly checked my A+ book about CMOS errors, and it said that configuration errors usually occur when the BIOS detects new hardware.  I didn't add any new hardware though.  Anyway, I finally decided to ask my dad if it was OK to experiment on the 486 (heh, a little late, but oh well).  He asked what I wanted to do, and I basically said that I wanted to be able to take the whole thing apart and put it make together again before I take the A+ test.  He nodded and said it was OK, and that if I mess up, there would be troubleshooting involved (duh) and that I could always take it into my computer class if things got bad.  I told him that part of becoming A+ certified is to be able to troubleshoot computers.  He nodded, and I walked off to the 486, thinking of what I could experiment with next.  I turned on the machine and found that I hadn't set the CMOS settings yet from yesterday.  I hit "Auto Configure from CMOS Defaults" and then "Auto Detect Hard Drive."  I set the time and date, and then wrote to the CMOS and exited.  Very simple stuff here, it just sounds complicated and scary.  I messed around with software settings and everything for a while, and then I turned off the machine.  I felt like doing some more upgrading.  Hmm, my 386 was sitting right next to my 486, I wonder if I can take some parts from it.  My 386 doesn't work now, in fact the POST beeps are one long beep, and three short ones.  And yes, the video card is in place, the POST beeps started before I opened it up.  Well, it sounds like bad RAM then, doesn't it?   Well, you see, when this 386 was made, SIMMs weren't that popular.  The RAM is actually part of the motherboard.  There are no SIMMs or DIMMs.  So I'm basically screwed.  Oh darn, my 7 year old computer that I never use doesn't work.  Well, it was a good computer, but there is a time for everything.  It was getting old anyway.  The funny thing about it, is that the 386/20 MHz CPU is on a card, which goes into a slot on the motherboard, like a video game cartage, and like the Slot 1 motherboards which support the Pentium IIs and IIIs.  I think I'm going to cut out CPU from the card and make it into a key chain.  heh, that would be pretty cool.  Well, its getting late, but there is one thing I want to do...see if that 40 MB hard drive still works...

 

5-14-99:  My 40 MB hard drive from my 386 is a big old thing.  Its about twice as big and twice as heavy as my old 504 MB hard drive from my 486.  I unplugged the cable and power connection that was hooked up to the 504 MB hard drive and plugged in the 40 MB drive.  I was guessing that when I turned on the 486, and after it checked the RAM, it would give me some kind of error about the hard drive, because the CMOS has settings for the 504 MB hard drive.  So, I turned on the computer and watched.  When it checked the 40 MB hard drive (which is loud!), it got in some kind of loop or something.  These loud, high pitched beeps were coming from the hard drive!  At first it sounded like something the PC speaker would do, but nope, it was coming right from the drive.  Well, I knew that this couldn't be good, so I reset the computer.  This time I entered the BIOS and had it detect the hard drive.  I exited the BIOS, and got an error message "Missing operating system."  A normal error message for a drive that doesn't have any OS installed, but this one did.  I figure that data on the drive must of slowly degraded over time because the computer wasn't turned on for a while, or maybe those high pitch beeps meant something, like screwing up stuff on the hard drive.  I decided I would fix it later, so I re-hooked the original 504 MB hard drive.  Tomorrow I would add an extra floppy drive to the 486 and test out a new Pentium motherboard Russell gave me saying he couldn't get it to work…

 

5-15-99:  heh, a funny day at school today.  I had to go fix some computers for another class.  The teacher said that on one of the computers wouldn't load up Word, one wouldn't print, and another had a floppy drive error.  I took a look at the one that wouldn't load up Word, and it turns out that Word wasn't even there.  The teacher said it was working yesterday, so I did a little investigating.  I checked the disk space and there was only 4 MB of free space!  A little more exploring, and it looked like someone deleted MS Office 97 to put on Command & Conquer: Red Alert!  I left it, and told him that he needed to reinstall Office.  I looked at the computer that wouldn't boot and he said that someone was putting pennies into the computer through the CD-ROM drive!  Damn teenagers.  Uh, wait, I am a teenager.  Well, um, yeah, anyway, he said that he would have someone else look at that.  I fixed the other computer that wouldn't print by reinstalling the Printer through the network.  Simple as that.

 

Anyway, time to upgrade my 486….

After about a half-an hour trying to figure out how to take out the floppy drive from my 386, I hooked it up to my 486.  The floppy drive cable has two drive connectors, one for drive A and one for drive B.  I plugged the drive B connector in to the old floppy drive (which was outside the case, not screwed in yet), and turned on the computer.  I had to go into the BIOS and change the Drive B setting to 1.44 MB.  The drive worked fine, so I turned off the computer, unplugged it, and put it in an empty bay in the computer.  I got it all screwed in, and then tried to hook up the drive B connector.  One problem though.  The distance between the drive B connector and drive A connector wasn't long enough.  Damn cables.  I thought I was screwed, but then I realized that maybe I could make the old floppy drive A, and the one already in there drive B.  I hooked up the drive A connector to the old floppy drive, and the drive B connector to the original one. The cable barely reached.  I turned on the computer and watched it boot up.  I then tested everything out, and both drives worked fine.  I turned off the computer and looked at a motherboard box sitting next to the computer.  Russell loaned it to me saying that he couldn't get it to work.  He said all the jumpers were already set and that it already had a CPU and some RAM.  I took it out of the box and looked at it.  It had a Pentium CPU, a fan/heat sink, and some RA…wait a minute, these SIMMs look like they are installed wrong!  There are four SIMM slots and the two already installed on the two far slots.  I looked up RAM in my A+  book.  The first two slots are called Bank 0, and the second pair is called Bank 1.  The two SIMMs were installed in Bank 1.  Just to make sure I could be wrong, I left them. I knew that the bottom of the motherboard couldn't make a circuit with anything or else it would screw something up, so I just left it on the foam that was already there and set the board on the table next to my 486.  I unplugged power from my 486 and put it into the Pentium motherboard.  The motherboard had on-board video, so I hooked up the cable to it, making sure that the red line was near Pin 1.  I plugged in a monitor and flipped the power switch.  Nothing happened, just as I expected.  I turned off the power, and moved the SIMMs to bank 0.  I turned on the power, and grinned as the screen flickered and the RAM counted up.  It had 16 MB of RAM (1 MB which was being used for the on-board, so it had 15 MB free), and a Pentium 90 processor.  Hmm, time to do some more upgrading…I wonder if Russell will let me keep the motherboard, processor, and RAM?

 

5-18-99:  Well, I talked to Russell today, and he said that he took out the other pair of RAM, that's why it was in the wrong place.  I told him that everything worked and he said he didn't know why he couldn't get it to work.  I'm guessing that he didn't wait long enough for it to go through the POST…it takes longer than average before anything actual happens.  I asked him if I could have the motherboard, and like any sane person, he asked me for $$$.  $50 in fact.  He said he paid $75 for everything (motherboard, RAM, CPU).  I told him I had no $$$ [to spare], and I offered $25.  "What?!  No, I'll just let you keep it until you can get some money."  Okay, um, sure,  I'll keep it.  It's not as if he's gonna miss it anytime soon, he already has an AMD K6-350 and a PII 400 w/128 MB of RAM.  Bastard, I'm stuck here with a Pentium 200 and a 486.  After school, I decided it was time to do some more upgrading to my 486 (heh, new motherboard).  I unplugged the IDE controller, floppy disk controller, and the CD-ROM cable & sound wire.  After removing all the cards, I took out the motherboard, which was a real pain.  I was all concerned about the bottom of the board touching the metal underneath it and making a circuit until I realized that since there was no power, there was no circuit.  Of course there is always ESD (electrostatic discharge, AKA static electricity), but I could take a chance.  After I got the 486 motherboard out and set it down, I realized that the Pentium motherboard had none of those little white plastic thingies that hold the motherboard up.  Standoffs.  Yeah, they're called standoffs.  I decided I could just remove them from my 486 motherboard, since I wasn't going to use it anyway.  Easier said than done.  Standoffs only go in one way, and then they kinda "snap" in.  After wondering for about 5 seconds how I could take them out, I think "pliers."  I pull out my Leatherman® Tool. (A very useful in the world of computer hardware, and also considered a "weapon" at school, which means I get immediate suspension if I get caught with it). I flip the motherboard over and squeeze on the end of the standoff and try to push it through.  It took a couple tries, but I finally got it.  I put it in the Pentium motherboard, all happy and smiling that I got it, until I realized that I put it in upside down.  I took it out, and put it in the right way.  Four standoffs and one frustrated wannabe A+ technician later, I decided it was time to put the Pentium motherboard in the old 486 case.  Fortunately, I did check to make sure it fit before I unplugged anything up.  I slid the motherboard in, plugged in the video cable to the onboard video connector, which was plugged into the monitor.  After I plugged in the power, I turned it on.  POST was completed successfully, and all the RAM was found.  I turned off the power and plugged in the hard disk and floppy drive cable into two IDE connectors on the motherboard.  Nothing happened when I turned on the computer.  I took out the floppy drive IDE cable and tried again.  It worked.  Damn IDE cable.  I started to unplug the cable from the floppy drives when I remembered that floppy drive cable isn't supposed to fit into IDE connectors.  What the hell?  Doh!  I was trying to plug in the CD-ROM cable!  I got my SB16 sound card and put it into an empty ISA slot and hooked up the CD-ROM cable to it.  I also hooked up the sound wire to the card that went to the CD-ROM.  So, now, where did the floppy drive cable go?  I looked around and found a floppy drive connector hidden near the RAM.  Floppy drive connectors are slightly shorter than IDE cable connectors.  After I plugged it in, I hooked up the mouse to a serial cable that went to a COM1 connector on the motherboard.  I like this motherboard, my 486 had this huge I/O card where everything was hooked up.  I turned on the power and went to the BIOS to set the hard drive and floppy drives.  It detected the hard drive as 524MB.  Strange, its only a 504MB drive.  I let it boot up, and after it got into Windows 3.11, I realized the obvious truth:  my hard drive is stoned and my mouse is on crack.  My hard drive is hella slow, my 486 booted up faster than this.  And with my mouse, geez, whenever you move it, it takes something else on the screen and "pastes" it where it was.  So I have, like, all these fake windows drawn all over my screen.  Just to make sure this wasn't a "one time" thing, I decided to reset my computer.  I tried to exit Windows, but it just locks up.  I hit the reset button and the same thing happened.  Damn computers.  Time to play around with BIOS settings.  I check all the hard drive settings and double check them to what they really say on the disk.  Hmm, 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors.  Um, now, how do I find the size?  I think I multiply something by 512.  Yeah, that's it.  Since I have a FAT file system, I just multiply all the physical hard drive stuff together, and then multiply it by 512 bytes.  So, 1024 cylinders x 16 heads x 63 sectors x 512 bytes = 528,482,304 bytes, or 528 megabytes.  Well, I guess I don't have a 504 MB hard drive.  Strange.  After 10 minutes later of messing around with the BIOS, I decided to check out the motherboard manual.  "WARNING: Do not change the settings in the BIOS unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing or when told to do so by a trained technician.  Changing any of the BIOS settings, may affect the performance of your system and also cause your system to hang."  Ummm, oops?  Stupid motherboard books, always trying to hinder your learning by having threatening warnings that say that messing with BIOS settings can screw up your computer.  I skimmed through a couple of the BIOS features and descriptions, and I came upon this: "BOOT SECTOR VIRUS PROTECTION: Any attempt to write in the boot partition table of your hard disk will be enabled when this is ENABLED.  The DISABLED setting is defaulted because your operating system may have problems with it."  Now, I remember it already being disabled, but it brings up a point: something must be screwing with the hard drive.  I started to go through some things, and everything seemed fine, until I came to this:  ONBOARD SOUND PRO: ENABLED.  Uh, wait a second, I already have a sound card installed.  I disabled the onboard and rebooted.  Ahh, Windows can now exit safely without locking up. Damn onboard Sound.  Now, its time for this mouse to go to rehab.  Whenever I move the mouse, it makes a "trail" of windows.  I move the mouse off to the side and use keyboard shortcut keys to go into Control Panel.  Wait, now this is weird.  Its still screwing up and doing weird things when I use the keyboard.  All the icons are weird colors and I'm getting more "fake windows."  It must be something to do with the onboard video card.  I reset and go into the BIOS.  I add some more RAM to the onboard video and try again.  It's even worse, this time there are these black thick lines across the screen.  It seems like the more video RAM I add, the worse it gets.  It must be something else.  Maybe the video drivers?  Now that makes sense, because I have a different video card.  I was tempted to uninstall the video drivers right there on the spot, but then I realized that I didn't have any of the drivers for the new video card.  I checked out the manual again and it turns out they only have drivers for Windows 95 and NT.  I'm on a Windows 3.11 machine.  Time to upgrade.  heh, time to delete some stuff first. (10 MB free?!)

 

5-19-99:  After I deleted a whole bunch of useless files (AOL 2.5, AOL 3.0, another directory of AOL 3.0), I inserted my Windows CD and typed in setup at the D: prompt.  So far, so good.  Until… what the hell?  I need the upgrade CD?!  Screw this, if it won't let me install over Windows 3.11, I'll just delete it.  After making a backup of all the .ini files, I typed in DELTREE C:\WINDOWS at the C: prompt.  Ahhh, I always wanted to do that.  I wouldn't recommend typing that command unless you wanted to delete every single Windows file and directory.  Setup ran fine after that and started to install files.  About 1 ½ hours later, Windows finally came up.  Everything was working great, including the mouse and video card.  But I only had 16 colors going, so I decided to change the video driver.  I guess the default SVGA won't hurt, right?  Well, I changed it, and Windows asked to reset, so I clicked yes.  Then a Registry error popped up when Windows came back up.  Registry errors are bad!  I clicked on the big "Restore Registry from Backup" button and it reset.  However, when Windows came back up, it gave me the same message.  After repeating this process about five times, I realized that, again, I was screwed.  Wait, maybe if I deleted the registry files, Windows would automatically make some new ones!  I went into DOS and typed in attrib -h -r -s user.dat and attrib -h -r -s system.dat to remove the hidden, read-only, and system attributes from the two files that make up the registry.  I then renamed the files and started Windows up.  Well, I got about three more error messages and the same Window Registry error message.  AHHH!!!  I HATE WINDOWS!!!  Maybe if I just reinstall it…  I booted back to DOS and reinstalled Windows.  Everything installed fine, but when Windows tried to boot up, it said some crap about .vxd drivers missing.  You know what? I think I'll just set this little project aside for now…

 

5-22-99:  I went saw Star Wars:  Episode I today!  Yeah, cool movie!  However, I must admit,  I liked The Matrix better.  Don't get me wrong, Episode I was great, but The Matrix just drew me in more. Maybe it was the timeline (1999), or all the guns, or the sweet special effects, or the Agents (a term actually used in Networking…Agents are programs that monitor stuff), or maybe it was just cuz I like movies that makes you think about…stuff.  Anyway, Episode I got me thinking about computer hardware and stuff, and well, you know those Battle Droids that the Trade Federation had?  Ever wonder what kind of processor they use?  Cyrix man, Cyrix.  I mean, think about it.  Easy, cheap, and, well, crappy.  Why do you think the Trade Federation had so many?  They had cheap Cyrix processors in them!  Now, if they only had hard drives to store operating systems so they could maybe actually function without that big battle cruiser ship thing.  Hey, and you know lightsabers that jedis carry around?  Ever wonder about over-clocking them?  Think about it: a bigger, better, stronger, lightsaber!  Well, actually, I know lightsabers don't have any processors in them, in fact, I think they use some kind of crystal.  But if they did… think about it.   Well, anyway, this was a just about as bad a journal entry as you can get about computer hardware.  I'm outta here, later.

 

5-31-99:  The time has come.  Time to fix it.  Time to fix Windows 95 on the Pentium 90.  I decided I should just start over, so I did another deltree c:\windows.  It took about 15 minutes to delete everything.  I installed Windows 95 again, and this time, everything installed fine.  It booted up and Windows was working flawlessly.  I decided that this time I wasn't going to do anything stupid.  Time to fix this computer up, not experiment on it.  I decided I should defrag my hard drive, partly because it has never been defragged before.  I loaded up Defrag from the Program Files, Accessories, System Tools folder.  Wow, 24% fragmented.   That's about ¼ of the drive.  I clicked Continue, but it said that my drive had mass errors.  It said that my drive is "seriously damaged."  That must be the reason why it was going so slow.  I exited to MS-DOS mode and ran Scandisk.  Time to do a Thorough scan.  It said that it would take 38 hours!  I said OK, and it started.  Hmm, is it bad if the very first cluster of the drive is bad?  Isn't that the boot sector or something?  Well, I turned off the monitor and went to do something else.  The next day, 23 hours later, I turned on the monitor and found that it was only 5% done!  Bad, very bad.  I rebooted the computer with an MS-DOS boot disk (not a Win95 one), and ran scandisk again.  Maybe it will go faster?  Sure enough, it did.  12 hours later, it was finished.  I rebooted into Windows and tried to run Defrag again.  It still said it had errors.  I ran Windows Scandisk, but it locked up halfway through.  AHH!!!   You know what, I think I'll just leave the drive 24% fragmented…

 

6-1-99:  I'm signed up to take the A+ exams, both the Core and the DOS/Windows, on Friday, June 4.  Each test cost $128, which is a lot of money.  I really don't want to flunk this test.  Time to study hard.  Really hard.

 

6-3-99:  It's the day before the test.  Exam eve.  I've been studying really, really hard the past couple of days, and I have about 40 pages of study notes I printed up from the Internet.  www.cramsession.com is a great place to get study guides and read what other people had on their test.  I spent all my free-time within classes studying these notes, and well, trying to study for my other classes like Geometry and Spanish seems incredibly boring. 

 

Tonight, all I did was take practice tests.  I downloaded a whole bunch of them and I even had some on the A+ CD that came with the book.  I didn't like the practice exams on my Exam Prep A+ CD though, I would like to call them "crap."  Sure, there's some good questions, but there are also a lot of "who cares" questions.  The thing I hated most about it were all the Windows NT questions.  They bombarded me with NT question after NT question, over and over.  I didn't study anything about NT, because first of all, I don't have an NT machine to practice on, and second, I started to read an Windows NT Server book at the beginning of the semester and I got really frustrated.  I failed both the Core and DOS/Windows practice exams on that CD.  I even took them twice and I still flunked.  I got 666 for a score (I'm not joking) on one of the DOS/Windows exam and that freaked me out.  I decided to just ignore all the NT questions and copy down the questions I missed that seemed important.  I took a couple other practice tests from different sources, and I did pretty well on most of them.  Unfortunately though, I didn't have the whole evening to study.  Since my dad was out of town, and my mom at work, I had to drive my little brothers to all their little activities.  I made 4 trips (two for each one).  I did managed to take a couple exams real quick in between, but otherwise, it was a real pain.  Especially during rush hour traffic.  Well, afterwards, I had to drive over to my mom's place to spend the night, since my dad wasn't home.  Not only was I tired, but I was also, like, delusional.  While driving, all these weird ass questions that mixed computers and cars started to pop into my head, like "What is the boot process of a car?", and "What three files are needed for a Windows 95 car to successfully boot up?", and "A user says that the lights on her computer aren't working, even though the battery is working.  What do you check first, A).  The power  B). The light controls….", and so on.  I guess that's what happens when you study so hard.  What I needed most now was a good nights sleep.

 

6-4-99:  Guess what, I am now an A+ Certified Computer Technician!!!  I passed both exams, 84% on the Core exam and 89% for the DOS/Windows exam!!!  I am sooo happy!  So, let me tell you about it.  I arrived 15 minutes before my test was scheduled, showed my ID, signed some papers, and was escorted down a narrow white hall with flickering fluorescent lights.  Reminded me of Half-Life.  The testing room was small and had four computers in it, each separated so you couldn't look at someone else's screen.  Three computers were in use by some old guys with graying hair.  I sat down in front of my computer and wrote down all the IRQ numbers and I/O numbers down on a piece of paper that was given to me.  I had a choice to take the Core exam, DOS/Windows exam, or the Tutorial.  I briefly went through the tutorial, all it did was help familiarize one with the testing format.  It really isn't need for this test, mostly because the whole thing is just single multiply choice.  There were no multiply select or type in an answer type questions.  I decided to take the Core exam first.  It wasn't hard, but it wasn't that easy.  I would rate it easy-medium if you knew your IRQs, printers, I/O, and modem commands.  The part that messed me up the most was stuff with multimeters.  I've never even seen a multimeter, so I just guessed on those questions.  After passing the Core exam, I was asked to take a survey.  I did so, just for the heck of it.  Hmm, what is my age?  Um, [x] Under 25.  I took the DOS/Windows exam next.  It was very easy.  I started to get a little cocky when taking it, especially with questions like "How to you switch between applications?", or "If a Windows 95 computer locks up, what three keys do you press to bring up the task menu?"  Probably the reason why I found it so easy was all the questions referring to memory.  I knew a lot about that.  And guess what, no Windows NT questions!  I don't know why the Exam Prep practice exams test you so much on NT, but I didn't see a single NT question on both tests.  Well, I'm glad that's finally over, now all I need is a job…