Hi all,

After having time to come down from the excitment of passing my 270 I have had a chance to think about the future.

once I have achieved my Mcsa where do I go from there. Well I have a feeling that I would like to learn a lot more about virtualisation technology as I find it a very interesting concept plus I think that's its use will become widespread in the near future. This would hopefully put me in a better position career wise.

I know that even getting my mcsa is along way off (I'm hoping to get it inthe middle/third quarter of next year, but its worth starting to plan post mcsa.

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Hi all,

I took the 270 today and passed with 826. I got 58 questions in the test and the score was much better than I thought it would be. Im going to have a celebratory beer tonight and then a break from studying for christmas before starting the 290.

So im sat up in my office rebuilding another install of XP, good job the person im doing it for kept reasonable backups of their work.

Whilst doing that im contemplating what to do with my P3 800mhz pc and my dual 550mhz server. The server is rather a large beast so I am wondering if its worth getting a scsi card or two and sticking it in the pc so I can use it as a backup fileserver and then loosing the rest of the server. Dont really know if I’ll do that yet but its an idea i’ll mull over for a while and see what comes out.

Since i’ve had my most recent set up working I have had a trial edition of avast AV on my 2003 servers, that ran out a week or two ago and I have been looking around for alternatives. Again to my rescue comes an application from the GNU/GPL camp in the form of ClamAV, which runs perfectly on my vm server and client. It looks pretty unobtriousive and doesnt seem to have impacted on the performance of either much.

I think when I’ve finished the 270 I will take a ghost of my laptop which is my main machine I use for internet/email tootling and put server 2k3 on it as well and then use it in replication to the main domain controller on the network.

Today I’ve also had a quick look at a web 2.0 app called desktoptwo, its pretty much an OS in a browser with support for email,instant messaging news feeder and it also comes with open office installed. You can also save files on the web desktop using a virtual hard drive which I think is a good idea, however of course make sure there is nothing too important saved there as you dont actually know who has the data and you will lose it if the website shuts. But a quick 5 minute play with it does seem to point to further investigation required!

I’ve been having a dig round my techie books recently and found this one. I’d forgotten I bought it (must be less than a year old) and having looked through it I am quite impressed with what it covers.
It covers the obvious windows basics but I’ve also found chapters on citrix,netware (which is good for me as I support netware at work), plus unix systems plus physical network design etc. When I’ve done my 270 I will pick up the book and read it abit more as it does look like an interesting read, also very reasonably priced for £14.99 for 800 plus pages.

This is just a minor update with very little apart from a few photos of the pc. The case is the usual fairly uninspiring mix of black/gray and in the photos you can see the extention I had to make for the power switch cable.

One thing of note is i will use the migration wizard to copy as much as I can from the old pc to the new. Vista has already informed me that it will only be able to copy files rather than profiles and themes etc because the old OS is windows 2000.

The last photo is the spares I had left over, for it seems years now dell like putting overly large fans in their cases and then putting an awkward plastic cover to direct the airflow.

My dell has encountered another little issue which I resolved, I mentioned in the last post that it had an issue booting after I rebuild it with the asrock mobo. I have a feeling that it was the processor at fault as I have swapped it out for a P4 1.6ghz CPU I had lying around and I have not had a problem since. Its a bit of a shame that the CPU seems to be faulty but its still reasonably quick at the moment.

I have loaded Vista Business and Office XP on it as that will be more than enough for my mums needs, which is mostly internet surfing and a few documents and photos.

I am starting to find my way around vista now which is good, as I’ve installed the Business version on mums pc and I’ve got dual booting Vista Ultimate and XP home on my main games/virtualisation rig. I REALLY like the attended installation routine which prompts you with all the questions at the same time, so you can wait around until you’ve answered those and then go off and do something else, rather than being asked the odd config question here and there until the end of the installation routine.

Of course I dont use attended installs much these days but MS seem to have sorted out this little annoyance with here and there questions.

Its got me thinking a bit about whilst studying for the MCSA I’ll have a go at a few of the vista exams too, I know that it wont help me too much at the moment because it will be a year or two before any companies even think about adopting vista as a business desktop but still might be worth a look at. Perhaps I could just start with upgrading my MCDST to a vista equivilant.

Right then my mums pc is rather long in the tooth these days, something along the lines of a 800mhz p3 with 192 megs and a ropey and no doubt failing 40gig hdd. So I thought I’d upgrade it a bit at least so I don’t have to wait so long when I need to do things to it. So off to a popular auction website I went and after a few days purusing and contemplating I opted to get a machine that is being sold as faulty (partly because its cheap and partly because I love tinkering).

The item I won was a dell dimension 1100 tower pc with 512MB ddr 400 ram 2.5ghz p4 processor, and all the usual drives etc for around £30 which I didn’t think was too bad considering the spec of the machine, theres got to be aleast £30 of usable working parts in there.

So the machine arrived I plugged it in and booted it, the fans would spin for a second and then the pc would shutdown. Also I discovered there was no HDD with the machine which wasn’t really a biggie. So after a bit of fiddling and swapping of parts with another machine I discovered the RAM seems to be working ok as does the CPU which is the result I was hoping for.

So online shopping I went again and bought an ASROCK P4VM900-SATA2 motherboard and a Samsung 40gig sata hdd (that was on special offer for £15). When the items arrived I duly installed the motherboard in the dell case. This required a few minor modifcations to the case. The main one was the power connector lead wasn’t long enough to reach the new motherboard connection point. Also the arrangement of the power/reset/hdd light connectors were proprietary so I clipped off the connector and soldered on an extra bit of wire to the power switch lead and wound some insulation tape around it(which luckily I had salvaged years ago from a dead pc thinking they might come in handy).

Initially after I had put it all together and booted it preparing to load an os onto it the machine wouldn’t post again, but after a bit of fiddling that seems to now be resolved, I had diagnosed that if it happens again then it may well be the power supply that requires replacing but I’ll worry about that if it occurs again.

Overall I think I’ve spent about £70 on the project which if nothing else happens I don’t think is too bad for the spec of machine I have got. Also when I take out the old machine I’ll probably stick some more memory in it and put another copy of server 2003 (only for small functions) and add it to my domain for testing.

I’ll post some pics of the dell (especially the minor mods I’ve had to make) later and let you know how I get on installing an OS and stress testing it before it goes out for upgrade.

Hello,

Well this evening I took a practice test (provided by measure up) for my 270 exam. I passed with 80% which I am pleased about. I took it in certification mode so got 50 questions and just the results in objectives view. This has outlined what I need to work on before I take the actual test. I am also aware that I winged about 3 questions so if I got those right then that would have altered the score a bit.

still hopefully this means I can direct my studying and with the exam booked before the end of the year this may leave me in good stead.

Well after a couple of months of gentle learning I’ve just booked my 270 exam for some time before the end of the year (come on im not telling you that), this means I now have just a few weeks to get down to it and do some proper studying. I’ve also bought the measureup practice test software to help me figure out what I need to concerntrate on. As always I never feel ready for to take an exam but there comes a time when you just have to book it and then get your head down and hope for the best.

On another note I’ve installed Vista Ultimate with my technet subscription and also have managed to shoehorn xp drivers for my wifi card onto it. At the moment I’ve only really had time to install it, and probably wont do anything else with it until I’ve got through the 270. anyway the hard work begins now!