Well, I just passed the Net Essentials exam with the new adaptive format.  I'll have to say that I was caught off guard, as I didn't know the testing format had changed until the night before the exam when I found this web site.  I was in panic mode when I took the test and found that many of the questions were worded in a strange way, but my knowledge of the subject prevailed.

There was a scenario that said something like:

You have a main office and four other two-story offices in a different location 20 miles away.  The computers in each building will have distances with a max distance of 140 meters and you want to implement 10BaseT

Requirements:

Connect all five offices to network with each other

Optional Results:

You should use the least amount of cabling as possible

Solution should be as cheap as possible

Solution:

Connect each floor of office using hubs and one active hub for each floor.  Connect the two distant offices with fiber optics.  Imlement RAID with stripe set.  Implement Nightly-Tape backup.  Implement a bunch of other shit that has nothing to do with connectivity.

Now the answer to this wasn't clear to me, because, first of all, I think for a distance of 20 miles, you'd need a concentrator, but other than that, if it worked, you wouldn't have the "cheap as possible" solution, because although the connectivity hardware was the cheapest possible, a bunch of other stuff was implemented that wasn't necessary for the situation.

I chose "does not satisfy requirement", because of the concentrator issue. But I may have been wrong.

No OSI questions

You need to know which protocols are connection and connectionless!

Know how an ethernet card connects to a network (10Base2).

You'll get about 10 easy questions similar to the practice exams, so if you can answer about 2 hard ones correctly, you're there.

Also, look out for questions that should be in the "nt server" exam covering WINS and DHCP usage.  The recent brain dumps were a big help, as I wasn't as suprised when I saw the questions appear on the exam.

I would be very careful reading these new scenarios, because they are worded in a strange way to trick you, but if you _know_ this subject good enough to pass all the practice exams and read the brain dumps, then you'll definitely pass the exam.

Good luck on the road to MCSE!