Buy the Mike Meyers A+ book..I think it is in its 4th edition now. As for training..hmm...look around and see if any local colleges offer it....I took it at a local college...it wasnt perfect but it was enough....in other words the instructor made a few mistakes blah blah...and obviously he couldnt cover EVERYTHING but it will motivate you to study for yourself and thats the key.
And yes, just come here to this forum everyday and you will see all kinds of nitty gritty repair and A+ level stuff being discussed.
Also, my best advice is to have a spare system..or two is even better...to fool around with....or just a few spare hard drives will do the same thing...cuz you can just have one comp with two hard drives.....one hard drive is your regular hard drive with the install that you use everyday etc..you dont want to be experimenting around with it...BUT..if you have a second hard drive..you can just physically unhook the first one and slap in the second one...then you can do whatever you want with it. Install windows....reinstall windows etc etc. You learn by DOING.
And I really suggest that you learn as much DOS as possible. Although it seems ancient, it is a GREAT foundation and as of yet, you still MUST know it to be a good tech...just look at this thread
http://www.techimo.com/forum/t85016.html you look at the 8th post down and its all about simple DOS commands! lol.
What I used to do when I first started was , using WinME, I would go to a certain folder such as my documents...I would look at what all was in the folder.....then I would go to a DOS prompt and navigate my way to the same folder. I would do a DIR to see what was listed in the folder in DOS....I would make sure it all matches up with what windows shows...which it will. Then I would do something like make a scratch folder in My Documents..name it something like..."scratch".
Then I would put some junk files in it like little txt files and call em junk1.txt junk2.txt. So then I would do another DIR from the DOS prompt to see if the folders and files I created in windows would show up in DOS...of course they did. Then I would delete the junk1.txt file FROM DOS and then go refresh the folder in windows and see that, indeed, the junk1.txt file was gone, lol.
I know it sounds childish but in my opinion it is a GREAT way to get familiar with the real nuts and bolts.
Also a great learning thing for me was to take a plain old floppy and, in W98, just put the system files on it..which is an option when you format a floppy...it is "copy system files only"..ok, cool, so you have a bootable floppy...big deal, it has hardly any functionality cuz it only has the 3 files on it. So, NOW, what I learned to do was edit that floppy so that it would give drivers to the cdrom so that I could boot off of the floppy and access the cdrom. Of course when you make a regular boot floppy from control panel, it will have the cdrom drivers etc...but it was a great learning thing to be able to do it manually.
Just stuff like that . make your own special boot floppies with little utilities on them etc. Excellent way to learn.
Also, become a PRO with fdisk, with all of the options...learn em, know em inside and out. Also with all the W2k/XP recovery console type issues....cuz they are quite common.
JP
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