how good are http://www.certmagic.com exam preps for Microsoft and cisco exams ? . anyone have any info about this , then plz let me know . iam trying to shift from auto field to IT field and need some solid guidance

 

Test King is the best I have seen in a while. Some friends of mine have passed the CCSP exams using them with ease. Ofcourse you have to read the books but when your ready for some practice exams the Test King stuff is pretty good. What area are you looking into? Networking, Security, Desktop Support?? There are alot of fields to choose from. I have a CCNA,CCDA, Network+ Security+, MCP and SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer 1.4).

 

You can have my job, I hate IT.

<--------------System Engineer

 

studying now for the ccna...ugh. was it hard?

 

First off, do you have any IT experience?

I can tell you right now, paper MCSE's and/or CCNA's are THE worse IT people ever. You may look good on paper and may get hired, but you will probably get fired pretty quick too.

Taking the exams and studying it will definitely help, but I would recommend researching and spend a bit of "lab" time to have some hands on experience. Every bit of this will help.

I've met some people with very impressive certs and degrees but yet needed step by step assistance with things like setting up VPN clients, adding PCs to the domain on Active Directory...and better yet....can't map network printers yet alone add them onto servers.

 

Buy some older equipment off eBay and setup a home 'lab' to actually learn it. No books or videos or whatever beat that. I've failed my CCNA twice now. I bought some gear but then resold it before I got serious about studying.

 

I can certainly vouch for experience. I recently got my CCNA, which allowed me to be promoted to network ops at my company, but i couldn't really do anything until i played around with the routers/switches in our environment. Learn your concepts and basic commands from books, then hone your skills through experience.

 

Testking are illegal exams, i.e. copies of the actual exams with actual exam questions and answers. If you want "example" exams, you're better of buying redmond exams or similar authorized ones.

Testking and some similar cheater companies have experienced raids from law enforcement officials, and word has it that many CC numbers of people who bought these illegal exams are now in the hands of Cisco, Microsoft and co.

Those people who pass tests using testking are cheaters and your friends are losers. They probably suck as IT to begin with and with a little bit of luck, VUE/Prometric will have received word from the authorities to contact all the cheaters that bought their certs online.

I got my MCSE the hard way, several years worth of studying and tinkering around paid off. I'm now by far the most knowledgeable person in our company when it comes to Active Directory and Windows NT4, 2000/3 as well as Exchange 5.5 and 2000/3 technologies (stated by my boss and the CEO).

 

I suggest you visit www.mcseworld.com

The site has useful info and the forum is very helpful. You'll find out very quickly what books to study (be it Sybex, MS Press or whatnot), and you'll also find out what exams are legal and what are not.

There's a big difference between those exams, and I would tell you to just simply not bother with the illegal ones. If you get caught using them, you'll lose your ability to get certified full stop, and besides, it doesn't exactly do your concience any good.

They can also help you find your career path as the place has quite a few knowledgeable people.