Speaking as the guy Chad hired to replace him... It's my experience that hardware in the enterprise is disposable. Our shop is almost entirely Dell. If the hardware in question is still covered by warranty, we get warranty parts via parts direct. If it's out of warranty and it's a problem beyond swapping the hard drive, memory, or PCI/AGP/PCIe/whatever card with whatever we have in the spare parts bin, the box goes into our recycle bin. Our servers have extended service plans so they don't end up in the recycle bin. Most hardware troubleshooting comes down to recognizing the symptoms and the likely causes of those symptoms. A+ can teach you some of this, but experience will teach you more. MCSE does have some value IF you have experience to back up the MCSE. If you don't have any experience on your resume, MCSE really only shows that you can read a Microsoft text book and regurgitate the content of the book on the test page. I've worked through multiple MS certification books, and the labs are often just the tip of the iceburg. You may touch a few of the most common things and configurations, but I've found most of the information to be here's the tool you use for this task, and here are a few simple settings that won't break anything. Search google (or read the helpfile) to figure out what the rest of the settings do. The main vendor certification you want to look at is Cisco. I have a Cisco certification book handy for reference, but I haven't gone in depth and tried to pass the certification exams yet. If you want to get involved in networking at all, you'll want to at least know Cisco. At the very least you'll want to be able to tell your interviewer how the most common method used to reset the password on Cisco equipment from memory. And now that I've posted that, I'll have to remember to review my Cisco book before I interview for any future jobs as I've been a good admin the past few years and documented all the switch/router passwords. :) I've only glanced at the security certifications, but they look good, though I worry about some of them falling into the same trap as MCSE down the road as security is the current hot thing for making a buck in IT. -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned