MCSE

Yesterday I took the MCSE 70-210 exam (Installing, Configuring and Administering Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional) ...twasn't too difficult since I was already familiar with most everything in it. Also, I'm lucky cuz I got an extra 30 minutes for the exam, as does anyone taking it in English in a non-English-speaking country (best part is I'm a native English speaker ). I'm pretty sure I aced all the questions, but the only thing they tell you is whether you passed or not. That test had 50 questions. I don't know much about any of the other MCSE tests cuz for now I'm not interested in doing the whole set.

I read one preparation thingie for 70-210 & that was an excellent "Q & A With Explanations" pdf by testking.com (It's kinda big but I can try to email it to you if you'd like)

Microsoft has a bit of material here... microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcse/

MS endorses the practice tests by measureup.com & selftestsoftware.com ...but they're quite expensive (although you can take decent 10-question-or-so demos).

4tests.com has a lot of free questions, which might be helpful for study, but they're not quite the same as the real exams (4tests.com/exams/exams.asp?cid=1)

I've also seen other sites that offer ridiculously hard "demo questions" to try to convince you you need to buy their material.

hotcerts.com offers an large pack of IT study guides, including stuff for the MCSE exams, for one price of $85 bucks ...seems like a good deal, but I have no idea what kind of quality their stuff is.

I created an account with freetechtraining.com just now, and they had some free video training for MSCE 70-210, 70-215, 70-216 & 70-217, which I didn't spend a lot of time looking over.

So I can't really vouch for the quality of anything above, other than the one testking document I read. Be careful cuz there're a lot of crappy training sites out there that're happy to sell you crappy training material or stuff that's actually just a collection of KB articles from Microsoft's site, etc.

Monger,

Thank you for your insights and congrats on passing the 70-210!! I will definitely be looking at testking.com. Thank you again for your help.

Thanks. One thing, I don't know the quality of any demos testking offers for free, as the pdf from them I read was something a friend gave me.

It was 150 questions (which were very similar to the actual exam questions), with good explanations why each multiple-choice answer was correct or not.

Something like that is good if you just want to just pass the exams in a hurry, without necessarily getting the big picture about the technology, but in the long run it'd prolly be better to read an actual study guide as well. So if you purchased study guides & Q&A's for each of the 7 MCSE tests from testking it would get pretty expensive real quick.

That's why hotcerts.com's $85 pack looks interesting to me. But their "testimonials" seem a bit fishy. Dunno.

I've had good experience in the past with LearnKey video training CDs, but damn those are expensive.

Monger,

I would not be opposed to you sending me the material from testking. If it acceptable to you, that is. I have heard many complaints about the pass/no pass scoring. It seems that most people like to have a score, I guess I would too. Thanks again for your help.