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[TOC]

Introduction

The goal of this document is to collect different application settings that you will use during taking your JNCIE-X Exam to have a pleasant and uninterrupted experience. The last thing that you want to see while taking exam is a Screen of Death :(

How to fix a blue screen of death error in Windows 10 | IT PRO

or, worse, A notification to restart your laptop to apply unnecessary windows updates!

Registry Tweak to Force Automatic Restart in Windows 8 After Installing Important Updates – AskVG

in this document, You will see different optimization settings for exam applications such as Windows, SecureCRT, and Notepad++. At first glance, you will feel this is a long list to do. However, Remember, you need to do it only a single time for something like Windows Settings. In other settings, you need to do them a couple of times and they will be saved in your muscle memory.

Windows Settings

Below are some settings to tweak the Microsoft Windows 10 or Microsoft Windows 11

Firewall and Security Settings

  • Disable Virus and Malware protection since this service consumes high CPU

image-20230216154312855

  • Disable Microsoft Bitdefender
run command line as administrator then execute the following command 

REG ADD "hklm\software\policies\microsoft\windows defender" /v DisableAntiSpyware /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
  • Turn any info notifications related to Windows Security

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Search and Storage Settings

  • Disable Windows Search Service

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  • Also, Disable the indexing services for your directories

    image-20230216154450621

  • Remove Temp files

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  • Enable Storage Sense to git rid of temp files quickly

Services Settings

  • Ensure the background settings are disabled

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  • Turn off the Game Mode

    image-20230209173921796

  • Also, Turn off the xbox game bar

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  • Disable Cortana

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  • Turn off the Bitlocker

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  • Disable the transparency and animations under visual effects

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  • Ensure the US keyboard is added beside your native language

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if you're unable to add the US keyboard and you keep getting the UK layout instead, then follow the instructions in this link: https://superuser.com/questions/1429636/how-to-remove-unneeded-eng-international-keyboard-layout-from-windows-10-permane

  • Ensure the US keyboard layout is selected. Otherwise, the # (shift + 3) won't work as expected

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Windows Update settings

  • Update to the latest update available by Microsoft and do all needed restarts

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  • Then pause the updates to the time after your exam (7 days, for example)

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Battery and Sleep Settings

  • Ensure the battery power mode is Best Performance

    image-20230216155008561

  • Ensure your laptop never go to sleep mode (either when plugged in or connected to a power source) --> This is to avoid disconnecting from the JNCIE exam while taking a break

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Misc. Settings

  • if you're connected to the internet using the ethernet cable, ensure the Ethernet icon is showing connected

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  • Turn off windows HotKeys to avoid being triggered during the exam

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  • if you're connecting external display, then make sure to select it as your main display and choose Extend these displays option

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  • Also, make sure the Audio output is coming from your laptop/speakers and not from the display itself

    image-20230216155223154

SecureCRT Settings

As you already know, SecureCRT is the official terminal for JNCIE exams. You will get a licensed version of SecureCRT 8.5 running over Windows VM (different than your windows operating system running on your laptop). Below are a few settings needed to be adjusted on the SecureCRT instance

Editing the Global Options

  • Configure your preferred ANSI Color from Edit > Global Options > Terminal > Appearance > ANSI Color

    image-20230216155256780

​

  • Also, Do the same in Advanced > Color schemes

    image-20230216155401367

​

  • Make it easy to clone the current session to another tab by double click on the active session. Also, Avoid losing the current open sessions when accidentally clicking on the close session

    image-20230216155418020

  • Disable the Session Zooming using the mouse

    image-20230216155457099

Editing the Default Sessions

You can access the default session options from Edit > Edit Default Session

  • Disable the Jump Scroll under Terminal (This setting used to jump to the last line of the output returned from the remote host. it's distracting when you want to examine a log entries example). Also, Configure the NO-OPprotocol to be low number (20 seconds for example) to prevent disconnecting the session due to inactivity

    image-20230216155520412

  • Configure the default Terminal emulation to be XTERM with the support of the ANSI color that you previously configured in Global options. Also, increase the Scrollback Buffer to the maximum (128000), so you can examine long output without being overwritten

    image-20230216155550824

  • uncheck the 80/132 column switching under Emulation > Modes. This setting will keep resizing your main SecureCRT window when you enter to a tmux session which is very annoying.

    image-20230216155618664

  • Check Ignore window title change requests under Emulation > Advanced. This will force SecureCRT to keep the session name as the hostname (for example k8s-controller-1) and not change it to the name of the current directory (i.e. root@host:/etc/contrail)

    image-20230216155637441

  • Again, You can force using a specific look and feel on all sessions by copying the Current color scheme into a new name and then configuring the foreground/background color

    image-20230216155705835

  • The jncie theme for example, is copied from invisibone with slight change in background color

    image-20230216155726357

​

  • one of the important points, is to configure the Highlight keywords in SecureCRT default sessions to match for specific patterns using regex. I used to match IP addresses, states like UP, RUNNING, down, ERROR..etc

  • Example of bgp summary after applying the keyword highlighting

    image-20230209195611551

Notepad++ Editor

The N++ is installed by default on your remote windows session. below are the most important settings in the editor. There are two locations to modify the settings. The Preferences and the Style Configurator

Preferences

This settings is accessible from Settings > Preferences

  • Under General, Enable Multi-line to have multiline opened tabs. Also, Enable Double click to close document option to save time

    image-20230214193932596

  • Under Language, Ensure the default Tab Settings is set to 2 and the N++ will replace the tab with the white space. This is very important while editing the YAML file. You can also confirm that YAML language will inherit this settings from the default

    image-20230214194533077

    image-20230214194856299

  • Under Highlighting, Enable Highlight Matching Tags and Match case so you can easy find all matching keywords within a file

    image-20230214195116102

  • Under Auto-Completion, Disable it!. Yes you are not developing or writing a code in JNCIE-X exams and this feature is very annoying when you type in the editor.

    image-20230214195403113

Style Configurator

All important options under this setting are located under Global Styles. You can access it by going to Settings > Style Configurator then applying the following

  • Change the theme to one that is easy on your eye (I feel comfortable with Solarized-light)

  • increase the Font size to 11 or 12, then make this setting applied to all language by selecting Enable global fount size

    image-20230214195804375

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