Now i'm fucking glad i did start this thread !! Holy hell the sheer volume of information !!!!!!

Thanks to everyone who helped, i headed to the center yesterday and signed up for a CCNA course, i'll be taking it next month, i'm gonna look through the books i have and will keep asking questions if you guys don't mind :D
I might even take the MCSE too, if it isn't too expensive, but Tony's right, comparing them doesn't seem too fair. Hmmm..
I really might take a CCNP and go down that road instead though, Cetra's right chances of employment are much higher with that cert.

Thanks again, everyone ^_^ !

This thread is fantastic, because I get humiliated back and fourth, and I'm loving every moment of it. I really love all the clarification I'm getting. I'd rather be lied to by a million people and told the truth once, rather than lied to by ten people and never being told the truth. I also love how I thought the CCNE and the CNE were both the same thing. For the record, I was pursuing my CCNE, but not my CNE.

As for the SCSI on the 486, I could set up a slave hard drive via SCSI, but I couldn't set up the master hard drive on the SCSI card. We researched it online, and all we could find was the 486 architecture did not support SCSI devices. I thought it was pretty fruitless that we, the people paying for a class, were working on 486s while the Linux club was given Pentium IIIs, but my college is all about payoffs and favors anyhow.

Now a new question! What Macintosh certs are out there? I never got in to the Mac stuff, but that is a huge industry that is hardly tapped.

I don't know how others will fare, but I only got two MCP certs, and that combined with my AS degree got me a job paying $45K/yr. (note that I was only 19 at the time, and I didn't have much experience outside of school).

I can't say for sure, but I thought the later generation MAUs would detect these issues, broadcast a notification that the 'stuck' token was dead, and reissue one. Not sure though. I just love the idea of not having to be concerned about packet collision ever. But that's just a personal thing, it likely wouldn't have any real world advantage these days, but I'd sure love to play with one.

I wouldn't take an Apple cert. unless it was paid for by an employer. I'd love to do it, but I can't imagine it being a worthwhile cert. to have ahead of time. It's just such a limited market, and any place hiring an Apple tech. will expect them to know their stuff, but not expect them to be certified. It'd just be unrealistic.

I remember those old token ring networks being faster than the 100baseT networks, but I haven't seen anybody support them since 2002. The only major problem was the cost of the infrastructure. It really wouldn't surprise me if some businesses that rarely upgrade still use token ring in their systems. Banks, government branches, hospitals, and universities may just want to eat the high cost of upkeep just for that extra speed and reliability. It's not unheard of.

I do a lot of contract scouting, and I see a lot of Mac based contracts out there. I pass them to Dave for a 10% finders fee, and he usually makes $120/hr servicing Macs, so I figure there has to be a Mac cert of some sort out there.