Free Hardware Certification

[thumbrule]

Hello,

Has anyone taken the free hardware certification at expertrating.com?? How does one prepare for it?

 

[aircooled]

Never heard of that one, but a free certificate is always nice.

If it's similar to the old "Brainbench - Computer Technician" one, I just read over the A+ study material, took the free online test and passed.


Looking at the syllabus:

Syllabus

Processors
Interrupts
Expansion Slots
Buses
Motherboard Components
Computer Hardware Concepts
Memory
Hard Disks
Ports
Display Cards
IDE and SCSI
Floppy Disks
Power Supplies

I'd say study the A+ material for most of the subjects, and research any subjects not covered with Google

 

[AndyHui]

Not very hard.....horrendously out of date though.

 

[holdencommodore]

LOL.... I did the test.... Did it with 29 minutes to spare and got a score of 86, only area I was kind of weak on was some areas of the storage devices and expansion ports which referred to very, very old buses and external drives. Didn't even study for it...lol.

Cheers

 

[WildMonkeyLover]

I don't know where in the world you would use that such out-dated information?
Maybe if you want a job in Iraq....

 

[aircooled]

It's a quick and easy way to put "Certified Computer Technician" on your resume

 

[Lord Evermore]

Considering the site is UK based, it's probably expected that nobody in the US ever heard of it. Can't imagine it's truly that useful a certification, unless that company is considered like the "CompTIA of the UK".

The questions on it may be about old technology, but there's lots of training courses that still talk about that stuff as if it was current.

"What type of connector does a 16 bit external IDE card have?" -- what the fsck is an external IDE card? Are we talking like ANCIENT stuff back when an AT PC used external devices?

Not the best test ever. Asking what bit size a PCI slot is, with both 64 and 32 as options but only one answer.

Score of 70, percentile 88. It always worries me to see exams where a passing score is 50% or less. A+ is only 40%. Of course, it worries me when any computer hardware exam is so out of date that I can't get a perfect score.

 

[Swanny]

I just barely passed it.

That's some old school stuff.


WTH is a floptical disk??

 

[DannyBoy]

WTH is a floptical disk??

ROFL

EDIT: Off to try myself out now

 

[holdencommodore]

A floptical disk uses a the same magnetic disk concept as a 3 1/2" disk, but i think it uses some optical components for greater data density. You can kind of think of it as a LS120/LS240 Superdisk drive...

Cheers

 

[DannyBoy]

OMG

Gay man thats just gay

I got 32 marks :| 30 percent :|

Grrr :|

Oh well nvm, I got 100% on repair, 100% on mb components, and i know what i need to know soo....I dont care

 

[DannyBoy]

Oh btw, could someone tell me what the heck an external SIDE controller is

Thanks
Dan

 

[holdencommodore]

don't know what SIDE is..... google might know though..lol.

Cheers

 

[DannyBoy]

Apparently a Super IDE controller that supports a whopping ATA66 transfer rate :Q :Q - EDIT - External though, which is ... unusual to say the least. Never seen external IDE controller before

*Cough*

Old man

 

[IanthePez]

One of my questions I love answers b and c, hehe.

Question:What types of slots does MCA (Micro Channel Architecture) support?


a. 8 bit and 16 bit
b. 16 bit and 32 bit
c. 32 bit and 16 bit
d. 64 bit and 128 bit

 

[holdencommodore]

Isn't MCA some 32-bit bus that IBM created back in the late 80's? Never really took off... even though it was superior to the old ISA bus...

Cheers

 

[Lord Evermore]

Micro-channel Architecture. Didn't take off because it was IBM's property and nobody else would license it, they preferred to skip it and use ISA and EISA and VESA Local Bus then PCI.

I never even HEARD of Super IDE before this. Looking it up, it seems like it's not really anything special, but is actually a single card with controllers for everything, parallel, serial, IDE, floppy, game port. One even looked like it had audio jacks but that wasn't mentioned in the specs. They seem to have been used on the VESA Local Bus as well as 16-bit ISA. I'd guess back then it was still an issue for computers coming with only one IDE port integrated. They also seem to be meant to upgrade much older computers to support EIDE or UltraATA, faster serial and parallel ports, LS120 drives, et cetera, because many list Win98 support.

Wow, even found an 8-bit card from SIIG.

 

[hfhf6]

I think most of the information on that test was outdated before I was born.

 

[DannyBoy]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Micro-channel Architecture. Didn't take off because it was IBM's property and nobody else would license it, they preferred to skip it and use ISA and EISA and VESA Local Bus then PCI.

I never even HEARD of Super IDE before this. Looking it up, it seems like it's not really anything special, but is actually a single card with controllers for everything, parallel, serial, IDE, floppy, game port. One even looked like it had audio jacks but that wasn't mentioned in the specs. They seem to have been used on the VESA Local Bus as well as 16-bit ISA. I'd guess back then it was still an issue for computers coming with only one IDE port integrated. They also seem to be meant to upgrade much older computers to support EIDE or UltraATA, faster serial and parallel ports, LS120 drives, et cetera, because many list Win98 support.

Wow, even found an 8-bit card from SIIG.

That was pretty much the information I saw, I can see its uses waaay back.

 

[PCMarine]

Originally posted by: hfhf6
I think most of the information on that test was outdated before I was born.

Yea hahah, I barely passed with a 55%. Being 16 y/o I havn't heard of half the stuff they put on the test so I had to use some educated guessing.

 

[AndrewNF]

Hmm, I got a 75%, some of those questions were based on really old hardware. I had a summer job refurbishing old 386s and 486s a few years back, so I knew more than I normally would have!

But I'm in the 96th percentile

I'm a certified geek, awesome.

 

[DannyBoy]

Originally posted by: AndrewNF
Hmm, I got a 75%, some of those questions were based on really old hardware. I had a summer job refurbishing old 386s and 486s a few years back, so I knew more than I normally would have!

But I'm in the 96th percentile

I'm a certified geek, awesome.

LOL. Well i must be reasonably normal then!

 

[Lord Evermore]

Wow, 5% score difference resulted in a jump of 8 percentile points. Obviously they don't have very many people getting very high scores. Maybe that should tell them something, sort of like the A+ exam.