Sim-Ex™ Tutorial for A+ Essentials

2.0 Laptop and Portable Devices

2.1 Identify the fundamental principles of using laptops and portable devices

• Identify names, purposes and characteristics of laptop-specific:

  • Form factors such as memory and hard drives

  • Peripherals (e.g. docking station, port replicator and media / accessory bay)

  • Expansion slots (e.g. PCMCIA I, II and III, card and express bus)

  • Ports (e.g. mini PCI slot)

  • Communication connections (e.g. Bluetooth, infrared, cellular WAN, Ethernet)

  • Power and electrical input devices (e.g. auto-switching and fixed-input power supplies, batteries)

  • LCD technologies (e.g. active and passive matrix, resolution such as XGA, SXGA+, UXGA, WUXGA, contrast ratio, native resolution)

  • Input devices (e.g. stylus / digitizer, function (Fn) keys and pointing devices such as touch pad, point stick / track point) 

• Identify and distinguish between mobile and desktop motherboards and processors including throttling, power management and WiFi

2.2 Install, configure, optimize and upgrade laptops and portable devices

• Configure power management

  • Identify the features of BIOS-ACPI

  • Identify the difference between suspend, hibernate and standby

• Demonstrate safe removal of laptop-specific hardware such as peripherals, hot-swappable devices and non-hot-swappable devices

2.3 Identify tools, basic diagnostic procedures and troubleshooting techniques for laptops and portable devices

• Use procedures and techniques to diagnose power conditions, video, keyboard, pointer and wireless card issues, for example:

  • Verify AC power (e.g. LEDs, swap AC adapter)

  • Verify DC power

  • Remove unneeded peripherals

  • Plug in external monitor

  • Toggle Fn keys

  • Check LCD cutoff switch

  • Verify backlight functionality and pixilation

  • Stylus issues (e.g. digitizer problems)

  • Unique laptop keypad issues

  • Antenna wires

2.4 Perform preventive maintenance on laptops and portable devices

• Identify and apply common preventive maintenance techniques for laptops and portable devices, for example: cooling devices, hardware and video cleaning materials, operating environments including temperature and air quality, storage, transportation and shipping.