In my opinion go for the MS cert use it for MCITP later if its apart of a track your interested in skip net+ its not a pre-reg for sec+ no idea where you got that from. Sec+ can be taken on its own.
For the last five years I have had Microsoft's ISA Server 2004 in place but since I have recently setup a Linux box with squid for web caching plan to change it up abit. I have new hardware coming in for Windows Server 2008 R2 plan to replace Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 with Exchange...
But that would likely be the outcome if the op try's to power the board up with the cpu installed it may work fine or not at all but it depends what that pin is for. From what I see the fault lies with the socket loose pin that fell out. A snagged glove shouldn't be able to pull a pin out if...
I ordered cpu and mobo last week, downloading a few updated drivers in preparation for new install and I was wondering if i will need to flash bios on the board before it will work with i7 930 cpu? I Don't want to waste time setting everything up in main comp then have to pull it all back apart...
I took my A+ cert a few months ago and passed. I think real world experience is what helped me. Alot of the questions are geared towards real world scenario's some of which I don't recall even being in the CompTIA book. If you have had alot of hands on experience I would suggest you brush up on...
Thats about what i would suggest doing pulling the ram test each stick if possible or 3 at a time then test same set in different memory slots just to determine if their is maybe bad memory slot on the motherboard.
Couldn't have said it better found something that may be worth reading if your looking to pickup an ssd drive
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3656/corsairs-force-ssd-reviewed-sf1200-is-very-good/4
Here's a good site that shows various ways to apply tim
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=170&Itemid=1
A pea/rice size dab in the middle of cpu is fine but it depends on the type of heatsink your using
Just for home use plan to use some of those ports on switch for vlans already have the switch and rack. Plan to order 2 poweredge servers to finalize everything up got the ms software free from college so its not as costly.
I think 2 years from now or next year 2gb video cards will be common place on the higher end product lineup's so I say go for whichever one is most affordable for you now.