Posted by Kelson Lawrence on Thu, Apr 26, 2012 @ 08:58 AM
By Michael Aldridge
When I got my first "real" IT job back in 1998, I set my sights on the most prestigious certification that existed back then: the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification. Sure, the first step was to become a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). But what did the MCP title really mean? After all, passing any Microsoft exam would enable you to become an MCP. So a developer, a database administrator, and a server administrator might all have the same generic MCP certification. This lack of specificity caused many techs – and many HR managers – to yawn at the MCP credential. Instead, techs set their sights on a certification that indicated to employers exactly what skills they possessed. For server administrators, the MCSE was that certification.
Back then, we knew what it took to become an MCSE and we knew what an MCSE could do. Even better, employers and HR managers had confidence that an MCSE could administer a Windows NT-based domain. If you had an MCSE, you really knew your stuff. The certification commanded respect.
Eventually, Microsoft introduced the Windows 2000 exam track for the MCSE. At first, Microsoft threatened to retire the MCSE credential for those who took the old NT Server 4.0 exams and did not upgrade. However, Microsoft listened to the concerns of its certified individuals and created the "MCSE on Windows NT 4.0" designation. A few years later, Microsoft created the Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA) certification as a stepping stone to the MCSE.
Fast forward to a few years ago, when Microsoft announced that the MCSA and MCSE certifications would not be available beyond the Windows Server 2003 track. Instead, the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and Microsoft Certified Information Technology Professional (MCITP) certifications would be offered for the Windows Server 2008 tracks.
Many people speculated on why Microsoft abandoned the acronym of its well-known flagship certification. Some believed that the change was a result of pressure from countries that regulate the title "Engineer" and expect specific standards from those who hold this title. While this may indeed be a valid reason for changing the acronym, why didn't Microsoft simply change the E in MCSE to mean "Expert"? In 2001, MCPMag.com readers recommended that exact solution.
Some speculated that the MCSE had become devalued in the eyes of many techs and employers because of the proliferation of braindumps, which are illegal collections of questions stolen from the live exam that enable people to cheat their way to a certification. If this were true, why didn't – and doesn't – Microsoft take a firmer stance against braindump vendors and/or people who use braindumps to cheat?
Others believed that the new MCTS and MCITP certifications would address the "generic MCP" problem by adding designations to each certification title. In addition, these designations would allow Microsoft to create very specific tracks that would highlight the particular skills of a certified individual. Unfortunately, this led to certification bloat. Currently, there are a mind-boggling 59 MCTS certifications and 15 MCITP certifications. In short, it is a bewildering mess. After all, what is the real difference between an MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Support Technician on Windows 7 and an MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Administrator on Windows 7? If we techs have a tough time figuring it out, how would HR managers be expected to know? Are we indeed back to the problem of "What does it really mean to be an MCTS or an MCITP?"
We've had about six years to get used to these new designations. Correspondingly, HR and IT managers have gotten used to them as well. We've learned which MCITP tracks we should pursue, and we've worked to conquer them. And we've accepted the fact that, at some point, the MCSA and MCSE will no longer be achievable.
Until now.
On April 11, 2012, Microsoft announced the launch of its new "flagship" certification, the Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE), along with the lower-level stepping stone, the Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA). In addition, Microsoft has gone back and applied this new acronym expansion to the older iterations of these certifications. Many techs were surprised, particularly those who believed that discontinuing the MCSE was a bad idea.
But wait... everything is not back to the way it was. According to Microsoft, the new MCSE will focus on solutions, not products. And the MCSE track for IT administrators is called MCSE: Private Cloud, which deals primarily with System Center 2012, not Windows Server 2008.
Can a certification truly be a flagship certification if it is based on a technology that most companies don't use? Perhaps System Center 2012 will grow in popularity. But in my opinion, a flagship certification should be one that is the most central, the most visible, and the most popular.
Frankly, I believe this announcement creates more uncertainty than it solves. It is clear that Microsoft wants to capitalize on the acronym that most of us old-timer techs have held near and dear to our hearts. But creating a certification with the same acronym as the old server-based certification, while shifting the focus from a server technology to a management platform, is certain to cause confusion. Microsoft has announced that the old MCSA and old MCSE will continue to be lifetime certifications, so techs will continue to list those certifications on their resumes. So now when HR managers see "MCSE" on a prospective employee's resume, will they truly know what that candidate can do?
To add to the confusion, Microsoft has announced the launch of several other MCSA and MCSE tracks, such as MCSA: SQL Server 2012, MCSE: Data Platform, and MCSE: Business Intelligence. I will ask a similar question to the ones I asked earlier: What does it really mean to be an MCSE?
The new MCSA: Windows Server 2008 certification focuses on server-based technologies. Yet the MCITP: Server Administrator on Windows Server 2008 certification continues to exist. Indeed, both of these certifications are achieved by passing the same three exams: 70-640, 70-642, and 70-646.
Furthermore, the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator on Windows Server 2008 certification still exists, but there is no corresponding MCSE certification. When Windows Server 8 is released, will there be an equivalent MCSE-level certification?
As I previously mentioned, the old MCSA and MCSE certifications will continue to be lifetime certifications. But the new MCSA and MCSE certifications will require periodic recertification. Recertification is a sensitive issue with many techs. However, both Cisco and CompTIA require recertification, so it was just a matter of time before Microsoft adopted the same practice. And recertification requirements don't concern me nearly as much as the aforementioned potential for confusion does.
Over time, perhaps IT professionals, HR managers, and CIOs will grow accustomed to these new changes. In my opinion, Microsoft is about six years too late in implementing them. Had Microsoft made these changes back then, the transition would have been relatively seamless and would have eliminated most of the confusion.
Michael Aldridge
Senior Content Developer, Boson Software
MCSE+I, MCSE: Security, MCSE: Messaging, MCDST, MCDBA, MCTS, OCP, CCNP, CCDP, CCNA Security, CCNA Voice, CNE, SCSA, Security+, Linux+, Server+, Network+, A+
Posted by Kelson Lawrence on Thu, Apr 19, 2012 @ 08:16 AM
By Val Bakh
2.4.3 How to Load Drivers in WinPE
One of the great enhancements that comes with Windows 7 is Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). The first version of WinPE was released with Windows Vista; the version that comes with Windows 7 is version 3.0. WinPE is a small starter operating system that can be loaded from a removable medium or device, such as a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive (UFD), and can run entirely from RAM. This means you can breathe some vital signs into a blank computer or try to bring back to life a computer with a dysfunctional, corrupted installation of Windows.
A standard version of WinPE is included in all Windows 7 installation DVDs, and you can use Windows Automated Installation Kit to create a custom version that includes some additional tools, such as ImageX, for example. WinPE is based on the same kernel as Windows 7 and contains tools for managing hard disks, preparing installation images for mass deployments of Windows 7, maintaining those images, and troubleshooting corrupted installations.
Windows 7 includes a vast library of drivers for commonly used devices. Unless you have some exotic or very old hardware, chances are that Windows 7 will support it. However, WinPE is not that powerful and there is a good chance that you will try to start an installation and discover that there are no hard disks for you to choose from. You click Install now in the first Install Windows screen, and a few more clicks later, you are staring at an empty list of the “available” disks under the Where do you want to install Windows? title. The solution is under that list, in the form of the Load Driver link. Click it, and browse to a location where the disk controller’s driver can be found, such as a UFD, CD, or floppy disk. Once the driver has been installed and the system has detected the hard disk, you can proceed with the installation.
But what if you booted into WinPE not to run a straightforward typical installation but to troubleshoot a problem or to prepare the hard disk for a custom deployment? When the WinPE boot has completed, instead of clicking Install now, click Repair my computer and, in the System Recovery Options dialog box, click Load Drivers.
In Windows, there is usually more than one way of accomplishing almost any task. Loading drivers in WinPE is no exception. Press SHIFT+F10 on the keyboard to open a Command Prompt window and type the following command:
drvload Path\DriverFile.inf
Just keep in mind that, in WinPE, drivers are loaded dynamically. That is, they exist only in RAM and are gone when you reboot. Next time you boot into WinPE, you will need to load the same drivers again. Therefore, if you use WinPE often, you may be better off if you create a custom version of WinPE and permanently add the necessary drivers to it by using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool. DISM is available in both WinPE and Windows 7.
Posted by Kelly Mansfield on Tue, Mar 06, 2012 @ 07:00 AM
By Val Bakh
2.4.2 Drive Letters (part 2)
In the first part of this article, we discussed the drive letter assignment basics and the changes that Windows Vista and Windows 7 have brought in this area. Now let’s try a few tricks.
Suppose you don’t mind having a separate system volume, but you want the system volume to be easily accessible. Resolving this issue is pretty easy. The system volume is not really hidden; it just doesn’t have a drive letter. You can’t see it in Windows Explorer, but it is visible in Disk Management. All you need to do is open Disk Management and assign a drive letter to the system volume. Because very few computers have a floppy drive nowadays and no computer has two of them, the letter B is most likely available. And because the B drive alphabetically precedes C, using B won’t cause any inconvenience or confusion in case there are other volumes (D, E, F, etc.) on your computer.
Suppose you partition the disk yourself in advance. If you create one or more volumes and select one of them as the installation destination, Windows 7 installs on that volume in the traditional manner, making it a combined system/boot volume. If you mark one of the volumes that you created as active and install Windows 7 either on another volume or in an unallocated space, Windows 7 will use the active partition as the system volume but will remove its drive letter.
Here is a more interesting challenge. Suppose you want to force Windows 7 to be installed on a boot volume that is assigned a letter other than C. For example, in a multi-boot configuration, it gets pretty confusing when you have two or more instances of Windows 7 and each of them claims that its boot volume is the C drive. Whichever instance you boot into, it becomes the C drive, and the other instances’ boot volumes become D, E, etc. It doesn’t even matter if you assign the desired drive letters in advance. As long as you start an installation of Windows 7 from within WinPE, Windows 7 will always reassign the letters so that it ends up on a C drive. So are there any ways of reverting to the traditional letter assignment without diving too deep under the hood?
First, you should partition the disk into as many volumes as you need, designate one volume as active, and install one instance of Windows 7 on another volume. That volume will be assigned the letter C, regardless of any previous drive letter assignments. Then you should boot into Windows 7 and initiate a second installation on the volume that is currently assigned the letter D. The second instance of Windows 7 will respect the existing letter assignments, and its boot volume will remain drive D. In this manner, you can install a few more instances of Windows 7 on drives E, F, etc., and each of them will preserve the existing drive letters.
And here is our last trick for today. Suppose you don’t need a multi-boot configuration and all you want is to have a system volume with the letter C and a single boot volume with the letter D. How can you trick Windows 7 to give up drive letter C and settle for drive D? To accomplish this, you’ll have to install an earlier version of Windows, one that will accept whatever drive letter you assign to it. Although Windows Vista is less picky about having a separate system volume, it also gravitates to the letter C. Therefore, Windows XP is a better starting point for this exercise. First, partition the hard disk the way you want. You can boot from a Windows XP CD and create partitions during Windows XP setup. Or you can boot into WinPE and use the Diskpart command-line tool. Don’t assign drive letters at this point; Windows XP will assign C to the first partition and will assign D to the second. Install Windows XP on drive D, and launch an installation of Windows 7 from within Windows XP. Windows 7 will replace Windows XP by moving the existing files into a folder named Windows.old and will agree to live on drive D.
Posted by Kelly Mansfield on Mon, Mar 05, 2012 @ 04:25 PM
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Posted by Kelly Mansfield on Thu, Mar 01, 2012 @ 04:30 PM
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According to EC-Council, "To catch a hacker, you need to think as one." The CEH 312-50 v7 certification evaluates a candidate's ability to anticipate techniques a malicious hacker might use to compromise target systems. Successful candidates prove that they have the knowledge necessary to help protect computers and networks from potential attack.
Boson's CEH exam preparation product includes three full-length practice exams and covers all of the concepts tested on the EC-Council CEH 312-50 v7 certification exam. “Our ExSim-Max for CEH 312-50 helps ensure that a candidate has the knowledge necessary to pass the CEH exam and helps prepare a candidate for the types of questions found on the exam," said Josh Evitt, a lead content author at Boson.
Boson's ExSim-Max products are the most comprehensive and representative exam simulations available. Boson's subject matter experts have extensive hands-on experience in the IT field and over 50 years of combined experience writing about IT subjects. Boson is proud to bring this level of skill to the realm of the EC-Council exams.
Boson Software, LLC, is a privately held company that provides robust learning solutions that include the ExSim-Max practice exams and the NetSim network simulator for Cisco products. Boson’s products are used worldwide by individuals, businesses, academic institutions, and government entities. Through its affiliate, Boson Training, LLC, Boson offers instructor-led training for Cisco technologies and for security technologies, including the EC Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker™ program. Boson is headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., and also has offices in Tampa, Fla.
Posted by Kelson Lawrence on Tue, Nov 15, 2011 @ 04:45 PM
By Val Bakh
2.4.1 Drive Letters (part 1)
Disk drives are referred to by using alphabet letters. Drives A and B were commonly used for floppy disk drives, which are now ancient history; virtually no new computers have them anymore. Now drive C is usually the first drive on almost any computer. But what exactly is drive C?
Let’s start with the basic terminology. The device that you install in or connect to your computer is a hard disk drive, or simply a hard disk. It is also often called a physical disk. Before a hard disk can store your data, you must prepare it. You need to initialize the disk, create one or more logical containers, and format them for a specific file system. Although these are all non-trivial steps—each step requires a certain degree of consideration and planning—we’ll skip most of the details and focus on only what is relevant to the main topic. Those logical containers that you create on a disk have many names: partitions, drives, logical drives, volumes—to name a few. Technically, not all of these terms mean exactly the same thing, but most people use them as if they did. Let’s choose one—volume—and stick to it throughout this discussion. So a volume is “the thing” that you assign a drive letter to.
Sometimes, Microsoft has an interesting way of naming things. In Microsoft terminology, a system volume is an active disk volume from which a computer boots. Consequently, the system volume hosts boot files. They usually include some sort of boot manager, which is a program that presents one or more boot menus and loads an operating system. A boot volume is a disk volume that hosts an operating system; it is the volume that you specify during an installation when you are prompted to indicate where you want the operating system to be installed. These two theoretical concepts—a system volume and a boot volume—can both be the same disk volume or can be two separate volumes; generally, it’s up to you how to set up a disk and install an operating system.
In the olden days, installing Windows on a blank computer required substantial preparatory work and could easily turn into a real adventure if you were not properly prepared. Starting with Windows NT, installation CDs became bootable and things got a little easier. Windows Vista came on a bootable DVD with its own mini starter operating system (WinPE) and with almost no questions left for you to answer during a typical installation. Although those Windows versions were generations apart, they had one thing in common: unless you specifically wanted to split your installation into multiple volumes, the operating system, by default, was quite happy to live on a single volume, which combined the functions of a system volume and a boot volume. If you wanted to have multiple instances of Windows on the same computer, you needed to create a separate boot volume for each instance. Each installation knew its boot volume’s drive letter, and usually, each volume’s drive letter remained the same, regardless of which instance of Windows you booted into.
Windows 7 installs easier and faster than even Windows Vista, and on the surface, everything appears to be almost the same. However, there is one important difference: when left alone, Windows 7 will always try to install itself on a boot volume that is separate from the computer’s system volume. And another thing that sets Windows 7 and Windows Vista apart from all earlier versions of Windows is that, whenever possible, they both grab the letter C for the boot volume; that is, of course, unless you know how to trick them.
First, let’s try the classic approach: insert a Windows 7 DVD, and start the computer. It boots into WinPE, and all you have to do is click Install now. If the computer’s hard disk is blank or if it contains a sufficient amount of unallocated space and you select it as the destination for the installation, you end up with two new partitions. One is a 100-MB hidden system volume; it contains a boot configuration data (BCD) store, a boot manager, and a recovery environment (WinRE). The second partition is a regular boot volume—a C drive with a Windows 7 installation.
There are a couple of reasons for this new configuration. First of all, the practice of putting a system volume and a boot volume on separate partitions is tried and true; some of you may have been manually partitioning your computer’s hard disk in a similar manner for ages. This approach is rather convenient, especially in a lab environment, where hosting several installations on the same computer in a multi-boot configuration is not uncommon. Keeping the system volume separate from all of the boot volumes gives you the flexibility to do whatever you need to do with one installation without messing up any other installations and without rendering the entire computer unbootable. Outside the lab, in real life, where people usually have only one installation of Windows per computer, it is somewhat comforting to know that if the only instance of Windows on your computer no longer boots properly, you can press F8 on the keyboard at startup, select Repair Your Computer from the Advanced Boot Options menu, and try to fix the problem by using a few command-line tools that are available in WinRE. Or if nothing else helps, you at least can restore a bare-metal recovery backup that you have been keeping on an external USB hard disk for just that sort of occasion. And one more reason for keeping the system and boot volumes separate is that a separate system volume is required to support BitLocker drive encryption. BitLocker keeps your data on the boot volume confidential, but it needs an unencrypted space to start the computer and unlock the boot volume for you once you have proven that it’s really you.
So far, we’ve covered the basics. The next time, we’ll try a few tricks.
Posted by Kelson Lawrence on Thu, Aug 25, 2011 @ 12:25 PM
By Val Bakh
2.3.3 Using ImageXImageX is a command-line tool that can create, apply, and manage WIM images. Three architecture-specific versions of ImageX—for 32-bit computers (x86), for regular 64-bit computers (x64 or amd64), and for Itanium-based computers (ia64)—are available in Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). In previous blog posts, we have discussed how you can use ImageX to capture a generalized image of a Windows 7 installation on a reference computer. Now let’s talk about deploying that image to a target computer.
Windows deployment in an enterprise environment is an enormous subject. Depending on your goals, the scale of the deployment, and the available resources, there are too many methods and technologies to even mention in a short Tips & Tricks article. Therefore, we’ll focus on only a few details of the main underlying process.
Whichever way you look at it, ultimately, installing Windows 7 always boils down to applying a WIM image to a destination disk volume on a target computer. A standard WIM image of Windows 7 is packaged in a file named install.wim, which is located in the \sources folder on a Windows 7 installation DVD. By generalizing and then capturing a custom installation of Windows 7 on a reference computer, you can create a custom WIM image. If you want an automated deployment, you can prepare all the necessary settings and instructions in an answer file and initiate an installation by running the Setup.exe application with appropriate parameters from a command line.
To better illustrate the deployment mechanics, we’ll go through a manual process. Suppose you have a single custom WIM image in a file named Custom.wim, which is located on a network share, on a USB flash drive (UFD), or anywhere else where a target computer can access it. First, boot the target computer into WinPE and open a Command Prompt window. Then use the Diskpart command-line tool to create and format a system volume, a boot volume, and any additional volumes if you need them. Assign drive letters to the volumes, and mark the system volume as active. The drive letters can be arbitrary; when Windows 7 starts, it will remove the drive letter from the system volume, assign the letter C to the boot volume, and assign letters in alphabetical order, starting with D, to the other volumes if you created them. If you need network access (ImageX and the WIM image that you need to install might be on another computer), run the following commands:
Wpeinit net use DriveLetter: \\ServerName\ShareName /
user:Domain\UserName password
The first command will initialize the network, and the second command will map a drive letter to a network share. WinPE has never asked you for any credentials, and your computer currently does not belong to any domains. Therefore, you need to provide an appropriate user name and password to access the share.
Suppose the system volume is currently C and the boot volume is D. Also suppose that ImageX is available on the Z drive and the Custom.wim file resides on the Y drive. To install the WIM image on the boot volume, run the following command:
z:\imagex /apply y:\custom.wim 1 d:The 1 in the command is the index of the WIM image. Generally, a .wim file can contain multiple images. Each image in the file is assigned an index, which is simply an ordinal number. The index in the command is 1 because we agreed earlier that the Custom.wim file contains a single image. If you don’t know what is inside a .wim file, you can find out which images it contains and locate their indexes by using the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool. You can run the following command directly from the currently open Command Prompt window in WinPE:
dism /get-wiminfo /wimfile:WIMFilePath\WIMFileName
.wimAfter you have installed the image on the boot volume, you need to configure the system volume so that the computer can boot from it. All the necessary code is available in the \Windows\system32\config folder in the Windows 7 image that you have just installed on the boot volume, which is currently the D drive. To configure the system volume, run the following command:
bcdboot d:\windowsIf you have created any additional volumes, now may be the time to populate them with something. Of course, you can always copy the data later, when you are already running Windows 7. But in some situations, you may want to have that data already in place when Windows 7 starts for the first time. Depending on what you want to put on those volumes, you can Xcopy the necessary data from wherever it resides at the moment or you can apply additional WIM images if the data is stored in WIM images. A WIM image is just a nicely packaged copy of a disk volume. So it doesn’t always have to be a captured installation of Windows 7; it can be just about anything.
Finally, reboot the computer, and after a few minutes of initialization, the new Windows 7 instance will be ready for your first logon.
Doesn’t this deployment process remind you of something? Like restoring a backup, maybe? Starting with a blank computer and ending up with a fully functional installation and, perhaps, even with additional data? What if you captured everything from a normal, properly configured and functioning computer and kept it someplace safe in case the computer at some point becomes nonfunctional or otherwise undergoes an undesirable change? Although the native backup application in Windows 7 has regained some of the features that were mysteriously missing from Windows Vista, it is still much too automated and not very flexible. And the backups are so huge…. And there are so many pesky details to remember about how, when, and where they can be made, maintained, and restored….
Although ImageX is not intended as a substitute for a backup/restore application, in some situations it might be very convenient to use it exactly for that purpose. WIM images can be half the size of the corresponding backups produced by using Windows Backup. WIM images can be cut into pieces small enough to fit onto DVDs or even CDs. WIM images can be mounted to an active file system and can be reviewed and even manipulated in Windows Explorer. WIM images can be easily captured and just as easily restored to a new hard disk and even to a different computer. You get the picture….
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Posted by Kelson Lawrence on Tue, Aug 09, 2011 @ 11:22 AM
By Val Bakh
2.3.2 Activation and Custom Image Deployment
How does activation fit in with a custom image-based deployment? It depends on the activation method you want to use.
If you have only retail product keys, your options are rather limited: you can either provide a separate product key directly to each end user or assign the keys to the target computers by using a special administrative tool named Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT). The most recent version, VAMT 2.0, supports retail product keys and is available at Microsoft Download Center as a stand-alone download.
In an earlier section of Tips and Tricks, we mentioned two volume-licensing (VL) models: KMS and MAK. If you are already using KMS on your corporate network, activation is a snap. As long as you are deploying a VL edition of Windows 7, you don’t need to do anything at all. As soon as the deployment is complete and a target computer is started for the first time, the computer will be automatically activated by one of your KMS hosts.
If you decide to use MAK activation and you have an appropriate MAK key, you have a couple of options. One option is similar to the earlier mentioned situation with retail keys; you can assign the MAK to target computers by using VAMT. The other option is to assign the MAK to the original installation on the reference computer. Although Sysprep, by default, resets the activation status, the MAK will remain in the image. When the image is deployed to a target computer and the computer is then started for the first time, the operating system will be automatically activated in 72 hours over the Internet. Or the user of the target computer can manually activate it right away.
And in conclusion, here are a few useful facts about the Windows 7 version of Sysprep:
• If you run the sysprep /generalize /oobe command from within an activated instance of Windows 7, the activation status is reset and the installation returns to a 30-day grace period.
• You can successfully run this command in the same instance of Windows 7 only up to three times. On the fourth time, this command returns an error.
• If a retail product key has been loaded, this command removes it.
• If a MAK key has been loaded, this command does not remove it.
• You can create an answer file that instructs Sysprep not to reset the activation status, and you can specify the answer file when you run Sysprep. If you do so on an activated installation, the resulting generalized image remains activated. However, if you deploy that image to another computer (physical or virtual), the activation will be lost.
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Posted by Kelly Mansfield on Thu, Jun 23, 2011 @ 04:25 PM
By Amy Haigh
If you are planning to take a Microsoft certification exam in the near future, you may want to book your exam, or at least purchase an exam voucher, before the end of June. On July 1, 2011, the prices for many of Microsoft’s most popular certification exams will increase for the first time in nine years. Certifications to be affected include MCTS, MCITP, MCSA, MCSE, and MCDBA, and Boson offers ExSim-Max Practice Exams for each of these certifications. In the United States, the price for most exams will increase from $125 to $150 for regular examinees. For high school and college students, the price for most exams will increase from $60 to $83. Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) will receive a 50% discount on all exams. For Microsoft’s announcement and a FAQ about the new pricing structure, see the New Prices for Microsoft Certifications Exams Web page.
Testing centers will honor exam vouchers purchased by June 30, provided that you take the exam by the voucher’s expiration date. And Microsoft is promoting another option to lock in a further discount on the current $125 exam price. If you purchase a Microsoft Certification Pack, which gives you discounts for purchasing multiple exams at a time, and take one exam by June 30, you will have until December 31, 2011, to take the other exams in your Certification Pack. Even if you must rush to take your first exam by June 30, the Certification Packs include one free retake per exam, so it might be worth purchasing a Certification Pack even if you don’t feel completely prepared right now. For information on exam price discounts, see Microsoft’s Special Offers page.
And remember, to ensure that you are indeed prepared to take your Microsoft exams before or after June 30, check out Boson’s ExSim-Max Practice Exams for Microsoft certification exams. Boson’s No Pass, No Pay ExSim-Max guarantee has you covered if you fail the Microsoft exam within six months of purchasing the corresponding ExSim-Max product.
Photo by Steve Snodgrass on Flickr