CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1201) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• Laptop hardware: replacing displays, batteries, keyboards, storage and memory
• Display components — panel types, backlight, digitiser, webcam and antenna placement
• Accessories and ports: docking stations vs port replicators, USB-C and Thunderbolt behaviour
• Mobile connectivity and synchronisation, including corporate email and MDM enrolment

Know these cold:

• Ports and protocols worth knowing cold — HTTP/S, SSH, RDP, DNS, DHCP, SMB, SMTP, IMAP
• Hardware: switches, routers, access points, firewalls, PoE injectors and patch panels
• Wireless standards and frequencies, channel choice, and long-range fixed wireless
• IP addressing: IPv4 vs IPv6, static vs DHCP, APIPA, subnet masks and default gateways

Know these cold:

• Cable and connector types, and which one a given situation actually calls for
• Storage: HDD vs SSD vs NVMe form factors, and RAID 0/1/5/10 trade-offs
• Motherboards, CPUs, RAM types and channel configuration, expansion cards, BIOS/UEFI settings
• Power supplies — wattage sizing, rails, connector types — and printer hardware and consumables

Know these cold:

• Cloud models: public, private, hybrid and community; IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
• Cloud characteristics — elasticity, metered use, shared resources, high availability
• Client-side virtualization: hypervisor types, resource requirements, purpose of a sandbox
• Virtual desktop infrastructure, and when a VDI beats a physical build

Know these cold:

• The CompTIA troubleshooting methodology — and applying its steps in the published order
• Diagnosing motherboard, RAM, CPU and power symptoms: POST behaviour, no boot, intermittent shutdown
• Storage and RAID failure symptoms, including clicking drives, SMART warnings and failed arrays
• Display and network faults: dim or flickering screens, limited connectivity, intermittent wireless, printer output defects

Common mistakes

• ✕Learning the troubleshooting methodology as a list to recite instead of a sequence to apply — the exam asks what you do NEXT from a specific point in that sequence.
• ✕Skimming the cable and connector material because it looks like rote memorisation. It is heavily tested and it is free marks once learned.
• ✕Ignoring printers. They feel dated, but they appear in both hardware and troubleshooting questions.
• ✕Confusing RAID levels under time pressure — know what each does for redundancy, capacity and performance, not just the numbers.
• ✕Studying against 220-1101 objectives. The V15 weightings changed; troubleshooting and hardware carry different shares than they did.

Exam-day tips

• ✓Do the performance-based simulations last if any of them stalls you — they burn time out of proportion to their count.
• ✓Read for the qualifier: FIRST, NEXT, MOST likely and BEST each point at a different step of the same methodology.
• ✓Eliminate on symptom, not on vocabulary. Two options often name plausible parts; only one matches the symptom described.
• ✓Scaled scoring means every question counts — there is no penalty for guessing, so never leave one blank.
• ✓Budget roughly 50 minutes for the multiple-choice bulk and keep the rest in reserve for simulations and review.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (675 on a 100–900 scale) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.