A+ help your career?

I have heard this information from other certified A+ technicians. I visited the site you showed and found that:

1) the names of the tests are being changed
2) all documentation regarding test blueprints state that "these test objectives will be tested on UNTIL December 2000 or January 2001."

Whether these still are the same A+ tests or not, I suppose we'll see after 2000.

thats the word I was looking for. Thanks. I heard that too no more DOS win3.x etc. Good riddance to win3.x. I think it's a mistake getting rid DOS though. It's a good intro to text based interface.
Well I passed 4/00, guess I'm golden ;-)

The adaptive tests are designed to be a guage of what you know not how well you can guess. Although they are more difficult, the adaptive tests want to ensure the facility that you really do know almost EVERYTHING that there is to know about the subject. If you are not confident that you can answer almost every question 100% accurately, then you aren't prepared for the test.

A certification is just that: a certification. If you are certified as a QS9000 auditor, your clients will expect you to know everything there is to know about QS9000 auditing. The clients don't always know terminology or how to word questions, and the questions are geared for any and all possibilities.

The test doesn't guage you against the other test takers, it guages you against yourself--the TRUE comparison of knowledge.

Suppose you are in a situation where someone asks you a question about a printer: you answer correctly, so they ask you something related, probably more detailed. THIS is the situation that the adaptive tests are geared toward--the realistic ones.

How often will someone come up to you and say "What's wrong with my hard drive?" "Well, my monitors doing this." "Are you SURE that's what a DC controller is?"--all of these questions are unrelated and this type of question chain only occured in one place--on the standardized tests. Why were they testing in an UNREALISTIC situation?

THAT's what the adaptive tests are for, not for people who just want to guess their way through the questions they don't know. Since you can't B.S. through a problem, you now can't B.S. through a test, either.

If you fix a problem for someone, you only have one shot--especially if they paid for it--you CAN'T go back and redo it. Thus the not able to go back on the test questions. You get one shot to get it right, if you get it wrong in real life, your customers don't come to you again.

Your best bet is to find a friend who knows alot about computers and have that person help.
Then go out to a pawn shop and but a older computer. Thake it home, call your friend and take the thing apart.
Work you way back through putting it back together and getting it to work correctly.
After you are able to do that then start with working on installing an OS and troubleshooting instalation and configuration problems.
That's how I helped a few of my friends work their way into computers.

One other thing. I had a friend who had been trying desperately to get a job at a computer shop. After being told "no" several times because of not having "prior experience" He went to one last place and the manager was about to end the converstation and my friend asked him to show him that he could build and troubleshoot computers.
The manager was impressed and put him on a 90 day probation. During that time my friend took and passed his A+ exam. That's been almost 3 years ago andnow he teaches a small group of Jr. High students about computers using the method above.
That's the best way to get hands on.