CompTIA certification examinations are essentially governed through Pearson VUE and Prometric testing centers. Additional to CompTIA certification, CompTIA also offers corporate membership and CompTIA training.



The A certification displays competency as a computer technician. It requires two examinations to be fulfilled successfully; the A Core Hardware Examination and the A Core Operating System Technologies Examination, which concentrates completely on Microsoft operating systems. These can be studied and learned in a CompTIA course.

The CompTIA certification A exam is designed for information technology or IT professionals who have the equivalent of 500 hours of applied experience and CompTIA training. The examinations are computer-based and they are composed of multiple-choice questions, of which there is usually more than one correct answer.

Topics of the Core CompTIA certification examination will usually include IRQs, direct memory access, practical computer repair, which includes installing or repairing: modems, hard drives, network cards, power supplies, CPUs, printers and more. It's stressed in CompTIA training that the focus of the examination is not theory, but practice. Often graphics (which have often been disparaged as being of deficient quality) are normally used in examination questions. Topics that are usually in the Operating Systems Examination include: configuration files, memory management and historical operating environments as opposed to the avant-garde, newer technologies. These can be discussed and learned in a CompTIA course.

Most of the people taking the A examination regard the Core examination as the more significant, as it qualifies them as professional technicians after CompTIA training. The operating system examination is covered in much bigger detail in the MCP examinations, so there is less esteem in passing it; therefore, the A examination is primarily considered as a hardware test.

As of the end of the last CompTIA course, the A test is being restructured so that it will no longer be two examinations, but one test.

The other CompTIA course examinations have been under some criticism since its advent. This is due to the severe amount of hardware-related questions that were on the examination at the outset. Many of these questions were covered on the A examination.

The CompTIA certification examination costs about $153 each for the A OS and A Core. The time allocated is exactly 90 minutes per examination. The highest score that can be achieved is 900, where the score needed to pass is 515.

To learn more about CompTIA certification, and explore your training options, please visit http://www.unitek.com/comptia.php.