Subj : Windows 2000 MCSE Upgrade Exam To : Lawrence Garvin From : Steve Quarrella Date : Sun Apr 01 2001 04:47 pm SQ>> I don't test through Sylvan Prometric if I can avoid it. lg> Where do you test? VUE. I have nothing but good things to say about their service and their centers. They've always been very accommodating. What I will mention, though, is that if you test with them after having tested with Sylvan Prometric, you may need to get with Microsoft about combining your two transcripts. I was amused to find that I was an MCP twice after my first test with VUE, but to my shock, Microsoft promptly took care of getting things squared away so that everything showed up on the one transcript. Fat lotta good the NTE exam by itself would have done me. :-) SQ>> I'd have called Microsoft about that one. You made the SQ>> attempt, and Sylvan bollixed it up. lg> Well, I sent an email to prometric, microsoft, and MCP lg> Magazine. lg> No response from any of the three. I have found the associated customer service with all three of these to be less-than-intelligent, but I would have picked up a phone and called to say "I'm not taking it in the backside because Sylvan Prometric couldn't get their act together for me to take my exam on time." I still have an old answering machine with a message that Sylvan Prometric left months after they last screwed me, offering me a free exam if I'd test with them again (I was fairly nasty in my missives to them, which I sent via certified mail...calling them gets you an answering machine or dropped from the queue.). I don't plan on taking them up on this, but if I ever have to do so, I want to play the message for them and see what they do. SQ>> That's what I'm trying to avoid, given that my previous SQ>> employers want to reap the benefits of having someone with a SQ>> certification onsite, but they refuse to pay for it. lg> Now ain't that just cheap... I've not yet found an employer lg> unwilling to reimburse the cost of a passed exam.. though I My previous employer was a first in this department, as just about everybody else before that has been very accommodating. Some folks aren't fazed by certification. I understand that, as I'm not excited any time someone just pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and tries to impress me with it, but there is that feelgood aspect that gets lost. I did this for personal growth and for a sense of accomplishment, and when an employer says "I don't care about that," that's saying "I don't care about you." Oddly, given my language background, they WERE willing to finance some foreign language classes that I had in mind for this summer, despite the fact that speaking Russian would have nothing to do with my job (whereas my skills in Italian and French were put to company use last summer). lg> have had a few that didn't have the bucks to pay for the week lg> long course. I try to negotiate that as a perk, and in the case of my last employer, I DID get the one week of Exchange training out of the deal, in a small class with a good instructor where everybody in the class had had previous Exchange experience. That made things a bit more "real world" instead of having to waltz through the song and dance of "here's how to create a user." lg> On the other hand, I paid for my Microsoft guy last December lg> to sit in both the NT4 Core and NT4 Enterprise courses. He lg> never took the exams. Did you expect him to take them? lg> One thing I've noted about the MCSE 2000 track that I'm much lg> more happier about. I won't have to work on learning any lg> -applications- as it's now possible to earn the MCSE 2000 lg> cert by doing OS only classes... Those electives COULD get in your hair, I admit. TCP/IP was a no-brainer, given that it was hand-in-hand with every network I've deployed, but I could never get excited about the other electives (I did MS Mail and IIS3). I'm looking at taking the Exchange 5.5 test, given that my biggest exposure to BackOffice is to this, but it's hard to get excited about it. :-) [NetBEUI] lg> Well.. I've never rolled it out personally.. but sad to say, lg> I've seen quite a few implementations with it installed and lg> operating on a co-existant TCP/IP network. I chalk that up to lg> novice NT installers. I think everybody here who has deployed a network has been through this. My last three gigs have involved my coming into clean up after novice NT people. Some were good people with Netware background who did what they could, while others were just plain incompetent. There's always that search and destroy mission to get rid of NetBEUI and IPX/SPX. I consider it a job hazard. :-) lg> Incidentally, I was forced to install NetBeui on my home lg> network as it's the only way my OS/2 Fido node could see the lg> NT Server! No IP connectivity? I'm getting ready to install Services for Macintosh on my NT Server to accommodate the "new" Power Mac I just bought, but obviously, Fido software for Mac is a little more crude than that which exists for OS/2. I'll do little more than play with point software from the Mac. But I digress. SQ>> You know you're getting a bum deal, though, when they're SQ>> asking you how to install the LFN support on Netware! :-) lg> :-) I mentioned the old exams: They didn't ask squat about Netware on my 3.51 tests. They asked about Macintosh and UNIX lg> Interesting... though once I read the section one author lg> wrote that simplified the whole concept with "users join lg> domain groups and domain groups join local groups", the rest lg> of it seemed to fall into place. And some of those long, complicated scenario questions are addressed -easily- with that small bit of knowledge. lg> time "thinking". Of course, I -expected- to miss a few lg> questions here and there on topics I refused to study on the lg> grounds that I would /never/ use the information. I'm the opposite, because I know they'll ask me about those, and I want them to be "gimme" questions. I don't do much WAN or ISP stuff, personally, but I knew they asked about Multilink on the NTWS test, so I set it up in a lab, played with it, studied my books. I got a couple of questions on it, even though I don't use it, don't plan to use it, and will read up on it AGAIN if I have to use it. I think something the tests should be able to test, but can't, is resourcefulness. If I don't know a command line switch, I'm smart enough to type COMMAND /? to find what I need. Only through drilling for NT exams do I remember stuff like the switches for making NT installation disks and so forth. Come on, test me on something concrete. lg> I thought the TCP/IP exam missed a lot of significant issues lg> it should have covered as well. Maybe if they'd spent less I remember a Supernetting question. You ever done that? I think, based on our conversations in the past, you have much more experience than I do, but I did think they could have picked something a little less arcane for that question (I think they should test about WINS <> DNS...I've had to set that up a few times, and it just -stymies- people who don't have a good knowledge of these.). --- * Origin: Il Vaticano * Argyle, TX (1:393/9005.13) .