Jims' Network Diary – musings of a network admin

Rescheduled the 70-646 retake. This was going to be this Friday, but I decided a reschedule was best due to the lack of time I have to swot up between now and then.

Instead, I’ve booked it for one of the series of days I have off after returning from my holiday in Cypus in a few weeks – figured I can try to get some revision in from the sun lounger, and will also have three days when I get back to hit the books hard.

I’ve spent some of this morning downloading various PDF whitepapers on features such as Failover Clustering, NAP, PKI, etc, all of which are topics on the exam, as well as other interesting reads such as TMG, “Exchange 2010 on VMWare” (which is where my installation already resides), and a few others.

I’m hoping the more in-depth content that these contain will prove to be useful revision aids.

.. is brilliant!

Using it mostly as a study resource at the moment – my current series of training videos are loaded on, along with an e-book from MS about the changes made in Server 2008 R2. A colleague recently took the 70-642 exam, and found it to differ greatly from the learning resources (offical MS Press book) he’d been using. A little digging found that the exam had been changed to be very much R2 specific. So I’m covering my bases with the e-book.

As well as this I’ve got a subscription to the practise exam from Measure Up – incidentally, this is now identified as “60-646R2” instead of “70-646”, which I subscribed to February. So I’m pretty sure the exam will focus on the R2 changes in much the same way described above. The Measure Up site works perfectly in Safari, so I’ve been using the iPad most recently to do their online practice exams.

The form factor of the iPad and the instant-on make it perfect for my lunch-break study sessions – makes a real difference to having to lug my faithful old Dell Latitude 6400 (well overdue a swap-out, admittedly) around, then wait for the ancient installation of Vista to boot and decide it’s actually ready to load Media Player 😉

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a solution to the fact that the various books I’ve bought for my iPhone don’t scale to fit the iPad screen – they’re made for the iPhone screen size and that’s it. But it’s not a massive issue.

iBooks is also an absolute must – I’ve downloaded numerous whitepapers in PDF format when before I wouldn’t have really even thought about it.

So all in all, a great purchase – post to come soon RE: other useful Apps I’ve found.

Well it got here about 15:30.. Already purchased logmein ignition (amazing) and a leather case.

Bit disappointed that my purchased ebooks don’t auto scale to fit the screen, but haven’t searched too hard for a solution yet. Otherwise it’s sweet!