Things I've learned from the CompTIA A+ certification after working at Apple for ten years

Top 5

  • Virtual Machines are loads of fun!

  • Troubleshooting by first establishing and then testing hypothesis.

  • Anyone can learn to manage their home network if they want to, even you.

  • Your home network likely needs extra security.

  • Anyone can solve technology problems, they just need to persevere.

There are tons of options for books, videos, and classes. I choose the CompTIA CertMaster class and this is why:


  1. Web based learning available on all your devices, PC, tablet, smartphone.

  2. Virtual Labs that allow you to play with real virtual machines (so fun) and also learn to install hardware components into a virtual computer.

  3. Sudy Guides that offer a more high level chapter overview, very helpful to understand how everything fits together.

  4. Instructor led training or video lessons to cover lessons learned in the field.

  5. Practice test that actually simulates the real test, great to evaluate how test ready you are!

Have you seen someone walking around with a t-shirt that says “There is no cloud, it is just someone else’s computer”?


This is 100% accurate but can be a little misleading.


Your data is not being stored on some random person’s Dell computer, rather a server owned by the company you chose to buy the storage from.


  • Public - service offered over the internet by service providers to consumers.

  • Private - cloud infrastructure completely owned by the organization to maximize privacy.

  • Community - several organizations share either a private or public hosted service. Can be good for standardizing and security.

  • Hybrid - any combination of the public/private/community models. Seasonal businesses can remain light during slow parts of the year but scale up during peak seasons.

Cloud Elasticity:

  • High Availability - service experiences very little downtime.

  • Scalability - costs of supplying the services are more linear.

  • Rapid Elasticity - the systems ability to handle changes in real time.

Why use a Hypervisor?

  1. Speed - virtual machines can be made quickly.

  2. Efficiency - multiple virtual machines can be run using one machines resources.

  3. Flexibility - bare bone options allow the use of many different types of hardware.

  4. Portability - because the virtual machine is independant from physical moving from machine to machine becomes easy.

Now lets get into some details about Microsoft Windows that will sound familiar to features of MacOS and iOS along with some other applications and consoles that are very different.

  1. Data collection allows Microsoft to process usage telemetry. It affects use of speech and input personalization, language settings, general diagnostics, and activity history.

  2. App permissons allow or deny access to devices such as the location service, camera, and microphone and to user data such a contacts, calendar items, email, and files.

  • Standby / Suspend to RAM - Cuts power to most devices. For example the CPU, monitor, disk drives, and preipherals. Power will still be sent to the memory (ACPI modes S1-S3)

  • Hibernate / Suspend to Disk - Saves any open but unsaved file data in memory to disk and then turns the computer off (ACPI mode S4)

  • A laptop goes into standby state as normal, switching to hibernate before the battery runs down.

  • A desktop creates a hibernation file and then goes into the standby state.

Disk Defragmenter

The Defragment and Optimize Drives tool (dfragui.exe) runs various operations to speed up the performance of HDDs and SSDs:


HDD - defragmenting rewrites file data so that it occupies contiguous clusters, reducing the amount of time the controller has to seek over the disk to read a file.


SSD - data is stored in units called blocks that are not directly managed by the OS. Uses TRIM process to identify data that has been marked as deletable and then tag corresponding blocks as writeable.

Disk Clean-up

The Disk Clean-up (cleanmgr.exe) tool tracks files that can be safely reased to reclaim disk space. These files include ones deleted but still available in the Recylce Bin and various temporary files and caches. The tool can be run in administrator mode using the Clean up system files option to reclaim data from caches such as Windows Update and Defender.

System Information (msinfo32.exe) produces a report of systems hardware and software components. Produces inventory of system resources, firmware, OS versions, driver file locations, environment variables, network status, etc.

If a problem is detected by Windows, and error message iy typically generated. This error message can be researched on Microsoft Knowledge Base (support.microsoft.com) or other sites/forums.

Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc) is a management console snap-in for viewing and managing logs on a Windows host.

Task Manager (taskmgr.exe) can be used to monitor the computer's key resources. You may need to select show details button if in summary mode.

Under Processes you can expand apps or background processes to see where resources are being used.

These are three part syntax commands (command source destination) source is the drive name, path, and name of files to be moved/copied. Destination is drive name and path of new location.

robocopy command - utility that allows you to copy another file, recommended over xcopy now by Microsoft as it works better with long file names and NTFS attributes.

md command - create a directory.

rd command - delete empty directory, if not empty remove files and subdirectries using /s. Use /q to suppress confrimation messages.


  1. chkdsk x: (x is the drive letter) runs in read-only mode to scan and report wheather errors need to be repaired.

  2. chkdsk x: /f attempts to fix file system errors.

  3. chkdsk x: /r fixes file system errors and attempts recovery of bad sectors. You will be prompted to save any recoverable data, that is copied to the root directory as filennnn.chk files.

Check Disk cannot fix open files, may be prompted to scan upon next system start.

Taylor coud not connect to the network, let's fix it!

Taylor was not able to connect to the internet, so I did some initial testing and investigated to see what was going on.


You can see the status icon on the bottom right indicates no connection and the website fails to load.


After reviewing network settings I noticed that it is set to a static IP address, which can get turned on and cause problems like network connectivity issues.

Next I set it to DHCP so the IP address is configured automatically, once the settings are applied the indicator on the bottom right changes to show a network connection and the website successfully loads.


This internet connectivity issue has been sucessfully resolved.