Should I get CompTIA A+ in UK?

[MobileTechie]

At £1800 it most definitely be a waste of money. if you knew very little about PCs and wanted a way of learning then doing the exam after learning from a book would be quite useful.

The single best resource for the h/w side of PCs is the latest version of Scott Mueller's "Upgrading & Repairing PCs" book. If you wade through that tome and remember most of it you'll know almost everything there is to know of any value about PC hardware. It's a 100% must-have for any PC tech. I learned loads of things I didn't know plus is an authoritative reference book for when confronted with "will X will work with Y" decisions.

 

[joydivision]

It seems very easy, I am half tempted to sit the exam just for the sake of it, something else to add onto the CV It is probably a bit out dated now though. I assume the modern exams cover more about laptops?

 

[pugsport]

I took the A+ home study course through Computeach which cost me £1800,
depending on how much time you can devote the shortest term is estimated at 18 months to completion, it took me 2.5 years!! You need discipline and a structured time table, it is so easy to detract from home study.
The advantage of using a provider like Computeach is you have tutor support.
The package comprised of a 2 inch thick book the Complete A+, although many students who participated in the forums found this book to hard going and subsequently bought Mike Meyers A+ book, which easier reading. Also included was an on line interactive course, covering all aspects you need to learn, plus a login to a website (I forget the name) for practice exams.

I quickly found out, much too my annoyance alot of these resources are freely available on the internet, I also found sites that provide practice exams
at very reasonable prices.

Although A+ is considered an entry level into I.T. the course material covers such a wide and broad variance of topics, technical specs, various architectures etc, you have to learn it all as you never know what to expect in the exams, the pass mark is so high that if you get 4 or 5 Qs wrong you will fail the exam. I can confidantly state that most of you, if you took the exam would probably fail, like any subject matter you learn an awful lot of knowledge that you will never need in day to day business and eventually forget. One of the biggest frustrations of the mock/practice exams, was it took students on average 6 months to pass a pratice exam.You had to pass the practice exam before Computeach put you into the real exam.

My conclusion, do not pay a provider for a home study course, there are plenty of free resources on all subjects, this being probably the best

http://www.professormesser.com/

Although there are plenty of sites offering free practice exams they are not always up to date or comprehensive enough and I would advise paying for it.
Practice exams are essential, they will highlight weak areas.

 

[anglian]

Thanks for the replies.

I have decided to go for it alone.
I have a few books (Mike Meyers is one)
I am getting an average of 80% on practise tests that I have taken from a variety of places, so I think it is worth the £110 gamble to take the first part of the exam and see how I fare before considering any other courses.

 

[Dameize]

Heres some advice.

Go to the colleges and unis offering IT stuff as they quite often have the means to do the test my local college offers A+ exams at 80 pound each which is cheap.

Ask around!

 

[pugsport]

Thanks for the replies.

I have decided to go for it alone.
I have a few books (Mike Meyers is one)
I am getting an average of 80% on practise tests that I have taken from a variety of places, so I think it is worth the £110 gamble to take the first part of the exam and see how I fare before considering any other courses.

If I remeber correctly 80% is not enough to pass, I could be wrong, but it would be shame to pay for the exam then fail, I reccomend doing more practice tests and focus on your weak areas.

 

[anglian]

If I remeber correctly 80% is not enough to pass, I could be wrong, but it would be shame to pay for the exam then fail, I reccomend doing more practice tests and focus on your weak areas.

My bad, I am getting 80% before doing any reading on the subject, so should be ok after a book or two.

Exam is 100 questions with pass scores set as
675 for CompTIA A+ Essentials
700 for CompTIA A+ Practical Application
(on a scale of 100-900)

 

[Cornfed]

I used the Mike Meyers book as well. You can also save a couple of quid by getting the test vouchers from gracetechsolutions.com. £108 per test instead of £114.

 

[ImaPC]

Would someone that has taken their CompTIA A+ please check out this link

http://www.freepractice.com/Aplus/aplus_1.htm

and let me know if the questions (a bit out of date) are realistic of the actual exam.

Thanks

Tony

Haven't done my A+ but did buy the books, which cost me £750 (this is going back about 7 years ago)

The thing that put me off was that these books taught about Win95 and Win NT... which i thought was a bit behind the times, so never really bothered doing the course... I've still got the books somewhere lol

speaking of which, i did check the link out, and was quite happy to sit and answer what i thought seemed more common sense then anything else, however i did get stumped on the questions about voltage and the like...

It was all going well, untill i got to question 45...

45 The mouse works in MS-DOS but not in Windows 3.1. What do you do?

Once i copied it, i closed the window lol...

Do you really wanna pay $1800 to learn about windows 3.1 lmao

 

[pugsport]

The current A+ no longer covers older Tech such as NT, 2000 nor the manual configuration of devices apart from SCSI.

http://www.freepractice.com/Aplus/aplus_1.htm

I do not think this site has been updated for many years.

 

[rsarceno]

So, should I study for and get CopmTIA A+?

Yes, get as much certification as you can and keep it current. Most residential client doesn't know anything about it but some SMB client sometimes ask for it.

If you have experience and know the terminology then reading books is enough to pass the test. If you want Video Training, I recommend http://www.cbtnuggets.com and http://www.trainsignal.com.

I have been taking certification test since the 80's but for the pass 15 years, I have been buying my test voucher from http://www.getcertify4less.com. They are legit. It cost more to buy direct from pearsonvue.com and/or prometric.com

If case your not aware, there are also practice test available from Transcender and other companies. Be careful of Braindump if you elect to go in that direction.

I'm currently studying for my Cisco exam. If you interested, PM me and I will give you the forum links where I frequently visit for certification. I'm not sure if it's OK to publish links for other forums.

You need to visit these forum specially if there are simulation questions where it's possible to have multiple answer. The test will only look for specific answer. Other correct answer will not give you any point. Sometimes the most logical real life answer is not the correct answer.

Good Luck

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Would like to hear your views on if it is worth doing on not.

IMO, anyone that plans on being in this field for a living should do these courses/certs. Even if you come from experience and you think the class will be beneath you and boring.

With education, you should build a proper foundation....start with the 101 course and work your way up. Some of the higher end courses you may be interested in may have pre-requisites (like you have to have taken A+ already).

And even if you think you know it all already, you're bound to walk away from the class learning at least one new thing.

And do courses right...pay attention in class, read the books, learn what you're supposed to....don't go cheating and hit up braindump sites just learning the exam questions to pass the test. I call those idiots "paper certs"....they cheated to pass the tests, they have a wall of certs...but stick them in front of a server or router in some real world scenario and prepare to laugh your butt off at their fumbling and failure. Embarrassment to the field they are! I remember way back doing this big project deploying a wide area network for a school system for a big town in my state, the company I worked for was hired to design/install the WAN and infrastructure....and then hand over the network to the towns newly formed internal IT department. For a couple of months I had to work aside the new guys to familiarize them with it. This one guy they hired, bragged about how he flew through the tests to pass his exams. Yet anything I put him in front of..he'd stare at like a deer caught in headlights. I remember one specific example..installing a new NIC in a workstation...he was clueless on Device Manager and how to install drivers.