CompTIA® A+ It Technician Exam Cram Notes On Fdisk, Windows 2000 Dual Boot, Scandisk

A+ Certification, awarded by CompTIA organization is the most widely recognized certification in the area of PC hardware and software technologies. To attain A+ certification, one need to pass 2 exams, namely A+ Essentials and one of A+ IT Technician, or A+ Remote support Technician, or A+ Depot technician exams. Given below is quick review of notes for candidates preparing for A+ essentials exam.

1)If you encrypt a folder on an NTFS volume, all files and subfolder created the encrypted folder are automatically encrypted. Therefore, it is recommended that you use encryption at the parent folder level.

Also note that you can't encrypt a file or folder that is compressed. If you want to encrypt a file or folder that is compressed, you need to first decompress the file or folder and then encrypt. Only NTFS volumes support file or folder encryption.

2)Monitors accumulate very high static charges and need to be handled very carefully. Before attempting any repair, it is imperative to discharge any accumulated charges on the monitor. You can use a jumper, one end of which is grounded, and touch the other end of the jumper wire to the anode of the monitor. While doing so, ensure that you are not in direct contact with the jumper wire or the anode. You can use a screw driver or a nose pliers with rubber handle for this purpose. A "POP" sound can be heard when the static charges accumulated on the anode lead getting grounded through the jumper wire. Remember, that if you get in contact with the static charge, it may lead to severe burns or even fatal accident!

3)Never wear a wrist strap when working on monitors. Monitors contain very high voltages, sometimes fatal to human, even when the power is turned off.

If you are wearing wrist strap, the human body work as a conduit to discharge the electric charge.

On a personal computer, the general errors and the corresponding failures are shown below:

100-199 : System board failures
200-299 : Memory failures
300-399 : Key board failures
400-499 : Monochrome video problems
500-599 : Color video problems
600-699 : Floppy disk errors
1700-1799: Hard disk problems.

4)Using FDISK, the following activities can be carried out:

1. Create Partitions: You can create primary and extended partitions. Extended partition holds one or more (Up to 23) logical drives.
2. Set Active Partition: FDISK allows you to mark the primary partition as active partition.
3. Delete Partition: You can delete a partition by using FDISK
4. Display Partition Information.

5)When you are installing a different SVGA monitor, it is unlikely that the new monitor has the same capabilities as the old one. As a result, the image on the screen may not be readable. In such instances, change the video resolution to Standard VGA before installing the new monitor. You can change the resolution appropriately after the image on the screen is readable with the new monitor. It may also be necessary to load appropriate device driver, if you are installing a different display adapter.

6)While preparing for dual boot with Windows 2000 Professional, note the following points:

1. Windows 2000 must be installed on a separate volume. If a separate volume is not available, repartition the hard disk suitably, and reformat. You also need to take suitable backup.
2. If you want to have dual boot between Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 as the only operating systems, ensure that Service Pack 4 is installed on Windows NT 4. This is required since Windows 2000 upgrades the NTFS to NTFS 5. NT4 requires Service Pack 4 to read and write to NTFS 5.
3. You must install Windows 2000 only after installing MS-DOS or Windows 95.

7)You need to memorize the following port addresses before attending the exam.

Port-Base address (in hex)

COM4: 2E8-2EF
COM2: 2F8-2FF
COM3: 3E8-3EF
COM1: 3F8-3FF
LPT2 : 278-27F
LPT1 : 378-37F
Floppy Controller: 3F0-3F7
Hard Drive Controller, 16 bit, ISA: 1F0-1F8

8)It is recommended that a CDROM drive be placed on the secondary controller as Master. By this, it is possible for the OS to access both the Hard disk and the CDROM drive simultaneously, giving faster access speeds.

9)10Base2 network uses thin coaxial cable and needs to be terminated with a 50 ohm termination on both the ends.

10)A bad device driver can be un-installed using the Device Manager snap-in.

11)A CD can be recovered from any minor scratches by using polishing chemicals.But it does not guarantee repair. Only way to safeguard is to make a back-up copy of the CD.

12)A computer may reboot because the CPU is overheating. Ensure that you have sufficient ventilation for proper airflow, and that the CPU fan is working

13)A connection device that is plugged into a computer's serial/parallel port in order to perform a loopback test known as a loopback adapter.

14)A good fuse will show close to zero ohms ( typically less than 1 ohm). A bad fuse, will have open contact, and will show open.

15)A hard disk should never be low level formatted at the customer premises. It is highly recommended that it is done at the manufacturer's or at any authorized center.

It is very cumbersome to change the partition sizes, once the hard disk is partitioned and used. It may require backing up all the data and restoring after repartitioning.

16)A network printer can be added to Windows 9X computer by going to Control Panel, Printers applet, Add Printer and then selecting Network printer option.

17)A reasonable way of determining a bad power supply is that the fan will not rotate. Also, the computer will not boot and the LED s indicating the speed will be OFF.

18)A router for Internet sharing is normally configured using web browser. High-end routers may provide option for terminal connectivity, wherein you can connect a terminal, and issue commands for configuring the router.

A scanner driver is usually called TWAIN. The Twain driver will always have another name, for example, Microtek calls theirs ScanWizard, and HP calls it as DeskScan or PrecisionScan. The TWAIN driver comes with the scanner, and knows how to operate this one brand of scanner hardware. Each scanner manufacturer provides their own TWAIN driver for their hardware.

19)A. SCANDISK: ScanDisk is a utility program that was added to DOS Version 6.0. SCANDISK is a better compared to CHKDSK. SCANDISK can fix errors on data storage devices such as hard disks, floppy disks, RAM drives etc, and DoubleSpace compressed drives. It analyzes and repairs damage to the following:

1. Physical clusters
2. File allocation table (FAT)
3. Lost clusters
4. Cross-linked files
5. Directory tree
6. MS-DOS Boot sector
7. DBLSPACE volume header, file structure, compression structure.

B. CHKDSK (Check Disk): CHKDSK command, one of DOS commands, examines your hard drive for error conditions and reports the total size of the disk, how many files are stored there, and the space remaining. CHKDSK also reports the total amount of conventional memory in your system and the amount of conventional memory available. Note that CHKDSK can't report extended memory.

C. DFRAG: The DFRAG.EXE is included with DOS6.0 and later. DEFRAG utility arranges the clusters of data on the hard drive to achieve better performance by placing all of the clusters for a given file together in a contiguous order. DEFRAG does not do any repair on your disk, and errors, if any will remain on the disk.

D. BACKUP: DOS has a backup utility since version 2.0.

20)On a network card, active link LED is an indication that the link is up. You will be able to ping the local host even without the network connectivity. Device Manager NIC status not necessarily ensures that the network cable is plugged properly in to the NIC.

Active listening focuses on who you are listening to, in order to understand what he is saying. As the listener, you should then be able to repeat in your own words what they have said effectively. This does not mean you agree with, but rather understand, what they are saying.

21)AMR slot: AMR stands for Audio Modem Riser. AMR is a riser card that supports sound or modem function. With increasing CPU computational power, the digital processing job can be implemented in main chipset and share CPU power.

CMR slot: CNR stands for Communication Network Riser. CNR is a riser card specification that supports V.90 analog modem, multi-channel audio, phone-line based networking, and 10/100 Ethernet based networking. Thedigital processing is implemented in main chipset and share CPU power.

A modem can also be inserted using PCI slot. But, in such case, it will not be using onboard audio CODEC. The AMR card primarily attends to conversion of analog signals to digital and visa versa. Slot I is associated with CPU slots.

22)An AT computer will have two interrupt controllers. The second interrupt controller needs to deliver the interrupts through the primary interrupt controller. IRQ2 had been identified for this purpose on the primary and IRQ9 on the secondary interrupt controllers. In otherwords, IRQ2 and IRQ9 are cascaded.

23)AT style systems use two power connectors, P8 and P9 to connect to the motherboard. ATX systems use only one P1 connector to connect to the motherboard.

Automated System Recovery (ARS) requires that a system backup be taken using Windows XP Backup utility.