Saturday, December 13, 2008

Phil's A+ Certification Study Guide

Answers are marked with a '*'.

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CORE

61. Most PCs give a single beep on bootup to indicate they are ok hardware wise. You boot your PC and don't get a beep. What should you check first?

a. system board
b. ram
c. microprocessor
d. power supply
*e. speaker

62. What beep codes could indicate a system board or power supply failure? Select all that apply.

*a. steady short beep
*b. no beep
*c. one long continuous beep tone
*d. steady long beeps
e. one long, two short beeps

63. Your PC is continuously rebooting itself. Select all of the following that could be causing the problem.

*a. bad PC power supply
*b. faulty power at AC outlet
*c. bad system board
*d. defective adapter card
*e. corrupt operating system

64. You have an old PC that you decide to upgrade with a 1 gig IDE hard drive. You find that you can't configure cmos to see the entire hard drive. The best you can do is 540 meg. What is the fix?

a. get a newer PC
b. manually input the sectors, cylinders, and heads of the hard drive
c. put multiple partitions on the hard drive
d. make the bios think it's a SCSI drive
*e. use a device driver that makes the bios see the drive as simply a block storage device, or upgrade the bios if possible

65. A sound card typically uses which IRQ?

a. 6
*b. 5
c. 15
d. 1
e. it doesn't use an IRQ

66. Your IDE hard drive is not spinning up when you turn on the PC. What is the most likely problem.

a. bad data cable
b. incorrect jumper setting on drive
*c. loose molex connector
d. virus
e. bad system board

67. You have a PC with no video. Which of the following is LEAST likely to be causing the problem?

a. defective ram (bank zero)
b. defective microprocessor
*c. crashed hard drive
d. loose video card
e. low AC outlet power

68. I once had a PC with no video. I replaced the system board, CPU, and video card, and still had no video. I then replaced the IDE cable and fixed the problem. Am I telling the truth?

a. no, you're just pulling everyone's leg
*b. you betcha!

69. A virus can mimick just about any hardware symptoms you can think of.

*a. true
b. false

70. A static jolt of as little of ____ volts can fry most any PC integrated circuit.

a. 200
*b. 30
c. 1000
d. 200
e. 500