In a bout of madness, I booked in the 070-620 TS: Windows Vista, Configuring exam with the vague thought that I need to get the studying for the new Ms Os seriously underway, rather than mucking around with it on VM’s.
Upgrading from MCSE 2003 to 2008 or MCITP: Enterprise Administrator (sooo much more fun to say…) is three exams. Vista, then two about all the new features in 2008 and how to use them.
There are two Vista exam I could have taken, neither really seemed appropriate for “Enterprise admin’s” so I picked the configuration one. RTFM would have been a great place to understand what they actually are testing on, but hey, I run Vista at home, and sort of know what I’m doing.
Wrong.
The exam is for those that work with home users or very small companies that don’t use Vista on a domain.
I had found one of the MsPress books
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-620): Configuring Windows Vista™ Client by Ian McLean and Orin Thomas. Orin lives in Oz, so if I failed, my plan was to track him down and make him do the re-sit for me 
The book wasn’t too bad and I enjoyed Ian’s, who’s English, comments. I half expected a line starting with “In the good old days..”, but the antidotes are well worth the read.
The book covers how to use Vista (if it never goes on a domain), how to use all the built in software (we all ditch the second we install Office) and to use all the home features (you’d never let on a company network). All of which makes you wonder why it’s part of the Enterprise admin’s exam, but hum-ho.
The lads did a nice job of putting in real world commentaries and suggestions which were nice touches.
Anyhow, I rushed in to do the exam, as Real Life™ doesn’t just stop when I fancy doing an exam and I have this Forefront project going on amongst other things.
Top tip: make sure you put the right date of the exam in the calendar. I manage to arrive an entire day early. Oops.
I then turned up on the right day and finished the exam in about 45 minutes. There was about 6 questions of the 56 I had no idea about, the topics were in the book, but I must have passed out when looking at them. Using the old Sherlock Homes deduction method got me through thoses. To be honest any thing to do with faxing isn’t a fun topic for me, the few I had on Media Centre I had to flash back to watching a friend set up his Xbox with Vista Ultimate. Kevin, you legend, I think that got me past the finishing post 
Those desperate to pass, the book cover all the objectives nicely and hands on practice with Vista Ultimate with following the actual practices in the book is very helpful and should get you over the 700 pass mark easily.
How long do you study for the exam, a hour or two on a chapter followed by completing the labs? What exam do you plan to take next?
Greg,
As a I was reading through the chapters, I was playing with the Vista features.
It was roughly an hour per chapter on the 4 I felt the weakess.
The test is trying to ensure you know how to use Vista and IE 7. I found that running a couple of virtual machines with the other versions of Vista was useful, especially for the networking features.
As long as you can comfortably answers the review questions and use/configure the new features without reffering to the book that should be enough.
The next exam for me is the upgrade Exam 70-649. I’ve got a bunch of virtual machines with 2008 in different roles installed and plowing through the Ms white papers.
Chris, Is it worth doing Vista exam, I thought MicroSoft was moving on to win7 and xp is still the choice for most out there. I am currently flipping between vista or xp for my first MS exam.
If your talking the real world, XP is still the most widely used desktop client. Most of the companies I know of have no real plans of going to Vista any time soon. Windows 7 may be the nail in the coffin for Vista.
As the interface for Windows 2008 and Vista is pretty much identical, working on the 2008 server OS will allow you to become very comfortable with Vista anyhow.
I’d still grab a copy of Vista and have a play with it, as it does beautifully complement Windows 2008 and gives you a bunch of extra features.
HTH