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Hi Guys,

I have reached a bit of a wall in my studying, so far i have basically taken out all the components in my computer and put them back again and booted and it has worked fine, i have installed Windows XP pro and partitioned a Hard drive.

I am at the moment going through the command line prompt section in the meyers book which i am finding not that easy also the other sofware sections in the meyers book. I am able to read the book for about an hour a day and this is the 3rd time i have read the book and am starting to take it in a bit more.

Do you have any other practical training that i can perform on my computer? Any ideas would be great.


Regards.

 

I have a good project for you to do,

Your are going to install windows 7 beta free trial.

You will need to,

1) Google for the windows 7 beta link, hint (technet) it is a bootable ISO file(note: not all ISO's are bootable though) and is about 2 gigs or so, so I hope you have a decent connection. Make sure you choose the correct ISO x86 32bit if you have a PC and 32 bit hardware or 64bit if you have 64bit hardware etc...
2) You will need to add a new PRIMARY partition to your current drive google for EASEUS Partition Manager it's free! and see if you can work out how to add a second primary partition i recommend making it about 30 gigs or more. You make the paritition from wintin windows(running EASEUS from the desktop).
3) You now have 2 choices on how to install windows 7, you can either burn the ISO onto a DVD RW and boot from the DVD and install it that way or, you can unpack all the files in the ISO using winrar(an ISO is just like a zip or rar file really) to some folder on your current parition "C:\" and then run the setup.exe file from your desktop and when going through the install at the start make sure you install windows 7 it onto the new partition that you just created which is probably called "D:\" or "E:\" depending on what the next availble drive letter was...

 

I found that the testout free trial was helpful in this respect (was for N+ anyway). They have a lot of simulations which you can use just to build general knowledge.

 

Good idea but why not boot into windows command line by pressing F8 during boot and then use diskpart, its the standard command line tool with windows.

Why not try installing Ubuntu ?

Try managing your files in a command window, list directory contents (dir), change directory (cd), create directories (mkdir), renaming (rename), copying etc. Try experimenting with dir, find, telnet, ping, traceroute, netstat and ipconfig.

Try creating a self booting CDR with your own collection of files on it ?

Try backing up your PC with windows Backup.

Try disabling a device, say your CD-ROM drive in Control Panel. Afterwards re-enable.

Investigate what your startup options are with msconfig or windows defender.

Investigate what services are running with Control Panel \ Administrative tools \ Services. Try stopping and restarting a non essential service, say windows search indexer.

Try disabling autorun on your CD-ROM drive. Try altering file/folder settings to show full path and hidden files.

Investigate default programs and file extensions.

Try turning Simple File Sharing off and creating a share with correct security permissions.

Investigate the windows event logs.

Investigate windows Perfmon and taskmgr.

Investigate windows mmc and use it to create a new user account using the local machine users mmc snap in.

Investigate the windows filewall and what is allowed / blocked.

Investigate your BIOs, find out what the settings mean, (do not change anything unless 100% certain what you are doing !).

Perform a registry backup. Investgate the registry with regedit. Try turning on tab completion in command line. Again do not make any changes unless certain !

Download SysInternals tools, investigate what they do.

Install 7zip. Add 7zip directory to your system PATH. Try creating an archive using 7zip GUI and 7z.exe from the command line.

Install Firefox and Firebug, use it to investigate what happens when you download a web page.

Install Cygwin in windows or use Ubuntu dual boot, learn basic command line equivalents to previous windows dos commands in UNIX.

Try learning basic electronics, buy a soldering iron and build some kits from Maplin.

Try building a basic robot and controlling it using a parallel port contol kit.

Try creating a basic static web site by creating html files and assets in a correct folder structure in windows. Launch site using file URL in a browser.

Copy a small favourite app, maybe WordPad. Use a Hex file editor to read and change the resource section of the copied application, search for and change the About/Help text, run the application and observe the effect.

Try learning basic 80x86 assembler. See if you can write a command line app to print your name or an application to add two numbers.

 

Thanks Guys, lots of great advice, i will look into doing these suggestions!


Thanks again!!!

 

Some very good suggestions by dmarsh.

On the subject of bios settings,as long as you know how to clear your cmos you can mess around in there and you won't do any damage,it would actually be very educational for you.With the bios just take a note of any changes you make,that way you know how to return.Or just choose defaults.

Switch your cpu cache off in the bios for example and see how slow your pc becomes.You'll then learn the advantage of processor cache.

Also start installing drivers as much as possible,this is required knowledge for the A+ and crops up a lot in the A+.

Find a printer install the drivers,share a printer with another computer,things like that are part of the A+ and are part of the lab work you would do if you went to college to study this subject.

Install a wireless network card and configure it to work properly,again this is lab work for the A+.

 

That's a very helpful list dmarsh. Thanks.