Embarking on 70-640 - Please help with timelines.

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Hi all,

Glad I found this site Certforums. I am embarking on my MCSA and thought I would post here to follow my progression and keep me motivated with help from other people stories and experiences. I am not sure what your timelines have been in the past but I hope to complete the 70-640 exam in about 3 months. I will be able to do 2 hours a day and between 5 - 10 at the weekends.

Would this be realistic in what you have experience?

I have 2 decent laptops and a home server with Vmware on each available to me. At the moment I have been fiddling about with 2 PDC's, a member server, an XP and Windows 7 virtual machines. I have also purchased the Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed reference book.

My current experience is 8 years desktop support in various companies from Insurance to Telecommunications.

Any advice on your timelines would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Brian

 

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It always depends on what your experience is in the Microsoft world (as well as the real world!), how much exposure you have to server 2008, and how quickly topics can sink in. But yes, given that much dedication, you should be able to get it done in about 3 months.

 

The difficult thing is not knowing what level of detail is on the exam so you tend to try to remember everything - all 1000 pages of it. I've been at it 7 months averaging 10 hours / week. Although if you count messing with my own lab machines this goes up to about 9 hours in one day sometimes especially if your not quite getting something as I don't like to go to bed until everything is working correctly.

I would say that now I'm on the last chapter I knew about 40% of the material and that was a big surprise to me to realise how much I hadn't done in 10 years of IT and I have had plenty of server admin exposure like AD & group policy, just not enterprise level stuff like dns, sites & subnets, LDAP, federation services, rights management, certificate services etc - and IMO those are the really fiddly ones (especially certificate services)

It's difficult to put a time on it as we are all different but I have benefited a lot from not rushing through the study material.