The Exam's Coverage

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This exams aims to certify that individuals have at least one year of experience working in IT, often providing telephone support at the tier-1 or tier-2 levels across various types of environment that range from retail stores, to medium sized companies, to enterprise environments. General areas of knowledge required to pursue the 70-299 Exam include networking, desktop operating systems, security, and end-user applications, plus basic administrative tasks including solving logon problems, resetting passwords, and supporting desktop applications.

The exam's coverage is broken into seven areas:

* Installing and Upgrading Windows Vista
Covers the basics of hardware requirements and compatibility checks (e.g. Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor), performing a clean installation, upgrading to Vista from an earlier Windows version or from one version of Vista to another, troubleshooting installation issues, and installing and configuring Windows Vista drivers.
* Configuring and troubleshooting post-install system settings
Includes troubleshooting ...
... post-install configuration difficulties, configuring and troubleshooting Aero, parental controls, and Internet Explorer (version 7 is the primary current focus).
* Configuring Windows Security features
Working with User Account Control (UAC), Windows Defender, Dynamic Security for IE 7, and security settings in Windows Firewall and Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.
* Configuring network connectivity
Configuring networking through the Network and sharing centers, troubleshooting connectivity issues, and configuring remote access (Remote Desktop Connection).
* Configuring applications included with Windows Vista
These include media applications (Media Center, Media Player), Mail, Meeting Space, Calendar, Fax and Scan, plus the Windows Sidebar.
* Maintaining and optimizing systems that run Windows Vista
This means troubleshooting performance issues, using built-in tools to troubleshoot reliability issues (System Health Check, Reliability Monitor, Problem Reports and Solutions, and so on), plus configuring Windows Update and data protection.
* Configuring and troubleshooting mobile computing
This entails managing mobile display settings, and configuring mobile devices, Tablet PC software, and power options.

In the new exam page format, Microsoft not only lists relevant Classroom training courses, it also lists e-learning items as well as Microsoft Press books that focus on the exam. All in all this exam should help IT certification professionals establish a solid working knowledge of basic Vista operation, installation, configuration, and troubleshooting. As we'll see in the next exams, things quickly get more complex and interesting from here.
Patrick Regan has been a PC technician, network administrator/engineer, design architect, and security analyst for the past 16 years. He has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Akron. He has taught many computer and network classes at Sacramento local colleges (Heald Colleges and MTI Colleges) and has participated in and led many projects for Heald Colleges, Intel Corporation, Miles Consulting Corporation, and Pacific Coast Companies. For his teaching accomplishments, he received the Teacher of the Year award from Heald Colleges and has received several recognition awards from Intel Corporation. Previously, he worked as a product support engineer for Intel Corporation Customer Service, a senior network engineer for Virtual Alert—where he supported the BioTerrorism Readiness suite and as a senior design architect/engineer—and training coordinator for Miles Consulting Corporation (MCC), a premiere Microsoft Gold partner and consulting firm. He is currently a senior network engineer at Pacific Coast Companies where he supports a large enterprise network.

He holds many certifications including the Microsoft MCSE, MCSA, MCT; MCITP; CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Linux+, Security+ and CTT+; Cisco CCNA; and Novell CNE and CWNP Certified Wireless Network Administrator (CWNA).

During the past several years, he has written several textbooks for Prentice Hall, including Troubleshooting the PC; Networking with Windows 2000 and 2003; Linux, Local Area Networks, Wide Area Networks and the Acing Series (Acing the A+, Acing the Network+, Acing the Security+, and Acing the Linux+). He has also coauthored the MCSA/MCSE 70-290 Exam Cram: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, Second Edition and written MCTS 70-620 Exam Cram: Microsoft Windows Vista, Configuring; MCTS 70-642 Exam Cram: Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure, Configuring; and MCTS 70-643 Exam Cram: Windows Server 2008 Applications Infrastructure, Configuring. In addition, he has completed the free Microsoft practice tests for the A+ certification exams for Cisco Press.