Free CompTIA A+ labs

A bare case just arrived on the bench with nothing installed. The parts shelf holds what you need: a motherboard, a CPU, thermal paste, a cooler, two 8GB DIMMs, a 512GB NVMe SSD, a graphics card, and a PSU. Install those parts (paste on the CPU before the cooler goes on), then make every connection below.

Inside the case: the 24-pin ATX and CPU 8-pin power cables to the motherboard, the PCIe power cable to the graphics card, the cooler's fan lead to the CPU_FAN header, and the case's power switch lead to the PWRSW pins.

Outside the case: the PC and monitor power cords to wall outlets, a video cable from the graphics card to the monitor (a seated card turns off the board's own video ports), the keyboard and mouse to rear USB ports, and an Ethernet cable from the PC's network port to a wall jack.

Power it on, verify it POSTs and the monitor shows a signal, and set the NVMe SSD as the 1st Boot Priority device in UEFI.

Sign in with the local Repair account, password Repair!23.

A workstation can't reach the shared drive or the internet — nothing off this machine loads, though the mapped local printer still works fine. Open a Command Prompt and run ipconfig to see what the Ethernet adapter is actually configured with. It reads 169.254.18.44 with no default gateway.

That's not an address any server handed out — it's the address the adapter gave itself. Unlike the front-desk PC on the printer VLAN, this segment does have a DHCP server reachable, so a fresh request should succeed: release the dead lease with ipconfig /release, then request a fresh one with ipconfig /renew. Verify the new configuration with ipconfig before submitting.

A front-desk ticket came in: "Every time I turn the PC on, a black window flashes for a second, and now Windows Security keeps popping up a threat warning that won't go away."

Open Windows Security and run a Quick scan, then quarantine whatever it finds. The infection is also persisting itself through the registry — open Registry Editor and remove its entry from the current user's Run key so it stops launching at sign-in.

Windows Security -> Virus & threat protection -> Quick scan -> quarantine the threat. Registry Editor -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run -> delete the SystemHelper value.

Use whichever tools you like — Registry Editor, or a terminal (reg delete /v, or PowerShell's Remove-ItemProperty).

Grading is on the final state.