Professor Messer's CompTIA 220-1202 A+ Study Group After Show - July 2026

Jay sent this in and asked, "What are some key words or phrases used to figure out when taking the test to refer to Performance Monitor, Task Manager, or Resource Monitor? And, and will we need to know the application's MSC names?" This is something that we see with people even going to the process of trying to determine what you click on on the screen to get there, although modern versions of the exam don't really ask you that level of detail.

Now that there's a search on your, on your taskbar, you just type it in and you can find it very easily.

So they don't tend to ask you how you find it.

They used to do that back in the day.

Not a very good question really.

But the question here is more about MSC names and what you would choose for those...

Well, choose for those MSC names.

I guess it would be good if I had me on the screen and not you on the screen.

It would be good.

There we go.

MSC names.

So I think the best place to go to figure this out is going to be, not surprisingly, the official CompTIA exam objectives.

So let's find out more about what we're looking at with those particular things that we need to know.

'Cause there's a lot covered in Windows, and of course everything we need to know is in here.

So the question was specifically, uh, was about, see if I can find it myself, was about Performance Monitor, Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and if we need to know the MSC names, the Microsoft com- uh, Control Panel name, which is effectively an executable file.

But MSC just happens to be how we designate that.

So let's go to the exam objectives.

Here's the exam objectives.

I'm gonna specifically focus on section one dot four.

"Given a scenario, use Microsoft Windows operating system features and tools." And you can see in the exam objectives, they go through, in Task Manager, they say, "You need to know more than just Task Manager.

You need to understand the Services tab, the Startup tab, the Performance tab, the Processes tab, and the Users tab." So they really do give you quite a bit of information.

They lead you down the path.

But here answers the question we were looking at earlier.

Under the next option, which is Microsoft Management Console, MMC, snap-in, we need to know Event Viewer.

But we need to know more than just Event Viewer, don't we? And you'll notice in my presentation in the video training that we did, I include eventvwr.msc on the page, and the reason I add that on the page is because CompTIA added that on the page.