A manager directs a support technician to plug a device into the communications (COM) port. What port is the manager referring to?

A support technician has removed the case from a PC and sees a component in a square socket. What component has the support tech located?

A support technician is connecting an extended integrated drive electronics (IDE) cable to a PC’s motherboard and knows that pin 1 on the cable must match up with pin 1 on the port. How can the tech know where pin 1 is on the cable?

A support technician is installing a camera that requires the Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.1 standard. What type of connector is synonymous with USB 3.1?

A support technician is installing a new hard drive on a new computer. What type of cable connector will the technician plug in to supply power to the drive?

A support technician is installing a PCIe card that will use a combination of system memory and dedicated memory. What type of card is the tech installing?

A support technician is working on a motherboard that is 12” x 9.6” and has seven expansion slots. Which form factor is the technician working with?

A support technician manages mostly digital displays but has some older computers with video cards that can support both analog and digital monitors. What type of video interface do these older computers have?

A support technician needs to connect the USB port on a portable monitor to an HDMI port on a laptop to extend the laptop’s display. What kind of cable will the technician use to accomplish this?

A support technician needs to install a legacy peripheral component interconnect (PCI) sound card. Which of the following statements about PCI is NOT true?

A support technician needs to install an optical disk drive in a tower. How will the technician insert the drive bay?

A support technician opened a PC case and observed a small computer system interface (SCSI) connector plugged into the motherboard. What can the technician know to be true about the connector?

A support technician plugged a monitor with a USB C cable connector into a USB C port on the computer, but the monitor would not function. Why would the monitor not work?

Which of the following statements regarding most connectors and ports is NOT true?

A hardware technician installed a new power supply unit (PSU) in a server and is removing any unnecessary power connector cables from it. What type of PSU did the technician install?

A hardware technician is building a server that will process financial data in real time and wants to use error correcting code (ECC) RAM that will detect and correct errors, if possible. What else will the technician need to ensure exists in the server to support the ECC RAM? (Select all that apply.)

A hardware technician is calculating the amount of virtual memory in a system. Which of the following will the technician include in the calculation? (Select all that apply.)

A hardware technician is inspecting the notches on a dual inline memory module (DIMM) edge. What will the notches on the edge connector help the hardware technician determine? (Select all that apply.)

A hardware technician is ordering power supply units (PSUs) for the organization’s desktop computers. What type of form factor is the technician looking for the PSUs to have?

A hardware technician is purchasing mass storage devices and tells the salesperson that they must use flash memory technology. What type of devices will the salesperson show the technician?

A hardware technician is purchasing more servers for an organization and needs to ensure the power supply units in the data center have the correct output to support them. What is a power supply unit’s output capability measured as?

A hardware technician is reinstalling a heat sink with a central processing unit (CPU). Which of the following steps should the technician take to reinstall the heat sink without damaging the socket? (Select all that apply.)

A hardware technician is scanning a computer’s non-volatile storage devices for errors and infections. Which of the following will the technician include in the scanning? (Select all that apply.)

A hardware technician is tearing apart a non-functioning computer to salvage parts and pulls out a memory stick that synchronizes its speed to the motherboard system clock. What type of memory has the technician removed?

A hardware technician is upgrading a device with numerous, identical central processing unit (CPU) packages. What class of computer is the technician upgrading?

A hardware technician is working on a new desktop that can send 128 bits of data per transfer rather than 64 bits. What is this referred to as?

A software developer is creating an application that will run multiple parallel threads through the central processing unit (CPU) at the same time to reduce the amount of "idle time" the CPU spends waiting for new instructions to process. What type of process is the developer taking advantage of?

A student is learning about computer hardware and the instructor selects them to identify the component that executes program instruction code. How should the student respond?

A system engineer is configuring fault tolerance with a configuration that uses a logical striped volume with two mirrored arrays. What redundant array of independent disks is the engineer using?

A technician loans a laptop to employees when they go on travel and each time an employee returns the laptop the technician reformats it and reloads the operating system and all the software. After several years of following this process, the laptop is sluggish and often freezes. What is most likely to cause this to happen?

An employee is leaving the company and must return any removable storage devices they may have. What devices will the employee most likely return? (Select all that apply.)

An engineer is designing a new computer system and wants to provide active cooling to improve airflow and dissipate heat from around the components. What will the engineer use in the system?

To mitigate the heat a high-end gaming system will generate, an engineer is using a liquid-based cooling system in the design. Which of the following components are NOT a part of an open-loop, liquid-based cooling system?

Which of the following central processing unit (CPU) architectures implements a system-on-chip (SoC) where all the controllers, including video, sound, networking, and storage, are part of the CPU?

A desktop technician determined that a computer could not connect to the network because the network drop was not working. What possibilities are open to the technician for getting the computer back on the network? (Select all that apply.)

A desktop technician has responded to a user whose computer is running slow. The user claims they did not do anything that would cause the computer to run slow. What should the technician do to try to determine the probable cause of the problem? (Select all that apply.)

A desktop technician just fixed an issue where a computer would not connect to a network and verified the computer is communicating with the network again. What should the technician do now that will help with future troubleshooting efforts?

A desktop technician was troubleshooting a computer that would not connect to the network and suspected that the network interface card (NIC) was not working. However, when the technician tested the NIC, it was working. What will the technician do next?

A hardware technician is following CompTIA’s A+ troubleshooting model for diagnosing a monitor with a squiggly screen. The technician suspects the monitor screen is squiggly because it is located directly under a fluorescent light. What is the next step the technician should take?

A network technician wants all PCs on the network to go to a server to get their boot settings. What boot option in system settings will the technician configure on the PCs?

A technician is implementing a feature that will compare hashes of key system state data during the boot process to ensure that nobody has tampered with the system firmware, boot loader, and OS kernel. What feature is this?

A technician is troubleshooting a computer that will not turn on. The technician has verified that the wall socket and devices leading to the computer are working correctly. What could remain as an issue? (Select all that apply).

A technician is troubleshooting a failed redundant array of independent disks (RAID) configuration and is unable to access the RAID configuration utility. What does this indicate?

A technician is troubleshooting a projector that keeps randomly shutting down. What is the most likely cause?

A technician is troubleshooting a video display that is fuzzy. What has caused this?

A technician is troubleshooting an issue with a computer. Although the computer is on the network, the server will not authenticate a user. What kind of problem does this indicate?

A technician is upgrading the system firmware on a PC. Which of the following is the technician upgrading? (Select all that apply.)

A technician must determine why a computer is overheating. Which of the following may be the cause? (Select all that apply.)

A technician retrieved a computer from storage, powered it on, and shortly began to notice a burning smell. What does this indicate?

A technician started a PC and, when the vendor’s logo came up, pressed the F10 key. What is the technician doing?

A technician started up a computer and the power-on self-test (POST) issued a short beep. What does this indicate?

A user started a brand-new computer and received a “boot device not found” error. When the technician inspects it, what will they suspect the problem is?

An energy company needs to protect trade secrets and wants to ensure that none of its PCs are hijacked by malware. Since there are no shared computers in the organization, what can a technician enable to ensure that will not happen?

Every time a user attempts to save a file, the computer shows an error that reads, "Cannot read from the source disk." What kind of issue does this indicate?

An organization located on a large piece of rural property needs to connect its office building on the north side of the property with its warehouse and shipping operation on the south side of the property. The organization decides to connect the locations using long-range fixed wireless. What frequency spectrum must the organization use to ensure that nobody else can use the same frequency band?

A technician using the adapter that the manufacturer built into a computer’s motherboard wants to join a computer to a new and upgraded network that still uses the most common type of cable to connect. What kind of network is the company using?

A network technician is upgrading a grocery store’s checkout lines with contactless payment devices. What type of wireless technology are the payment devices based on?

All the employees in a lawyer’s office communicate with the internet and each other through the same appliance. What kind of network is the office using?

A network technician sets up the wireless network in such a way that each client device connects to the network via an access point (AP). What type of configuration is this?

A technician is wirelessly transferring pictures from their camera to their computer. What kind of network does the technician establish?

A wireless network technician is upgrading the access points in a conference center to provide better Wi-Fi connectivity during conferences. What standard will provide connectivity to the most clients?

A network technician needs to replace a broken Ethernet cable. What kind of connector will the technician use to terminate the new cable?

A network technician needs to deploy a computer on an Ethernet network and notices that the computer will sit on a shelf directly under a fluorescent light. What type of cable will the technician use?

An administrator needs to supply power to a handset through the switch; however, the switch does not support Power over Ethernet (PoE). How can the administrator solve this problem?

A college that has several campuses located in different parts of the city has hired a network technician. What type of network will the technician be working on?

A network technician is upgrading a legacy network for a small business and is replacing their legacy hub with a device that learns MAC addresses and uses them to forward frames to only the destination port, rather than sending them out to every port. What kind of device is the technician replacing the hub with?

A network technician is connecting a computer to the network using Ethernet. How is the physical connection to the cable made?

A network technician is trying to locate the Cat 6A cable in a closet full of unmarked boxes with different types of cabling in them. How will the technician be able to tell which cable is Cat 6A? (Select all that apply.)

A network technician used a tool that energizes each wire in a cable. When the technician sent energy to some of the wires, the LED on the tool did not light up. What tool was the technician using?

A small company hired a network technician to upgrade its network. Surprisingly the company was still using a legacy hardware device that configures a network into a star topology. What device was this?

A network technician is installing a device with an inductor that will copy all the traffic coming through the cable to a monitor port. What type of device is the technician installing?

A network technician is upgrading the wireless network so that it can take advantage of "multiple input multiple output" (MIMO) to increase reliability and bandwidth. What standard is the technician upgrading the wireless network to?

A company hired an administrator to manage their computers that host the employees’ shared resources and applications. What kind of computers will the administrator manage?

A company hired a network technician to manage the part of their network that is based on the 802.11 standard. What type of network will the technician be managing?