Using Notepad in the Exam

Folks,

I just want to poll for some information based on people's use on Notepad during the exam. I read last night that typing all your configurations into Notepad prior to deployment can help. To preface, I use notepad during my exam attempts for things that I needed to "cache" thoughts or repeated commands, but never for entire configurations. This sounds like a good idea but is it good enough to be practical and help with efficiency? As I am going on attempt number 3, i'm trying to be very serious about good habits that help save time. My last challenge with configuration was that I was slow and only had about 30 minutes for verification.

So, I'm on Vol.3, lab.3 and I decided to start this new tactic on Task 1 - 2.5 because it does require an extensive amount of configuration with several repeated commands. Many commands are related to spanning-tree, trunking, VLAN assignments and VTP. Therefore, I decided to take a single Notepad window, read the entire Layer 2 portion of the lab and proceed to write down all the necessary configuration on Notepad first. This created 170 lines of commands! There are a few spaces for separating the differents switches for clarity.

I wanted to weigh in the pros and cons of doing something like this:

Pros:

• View all configuration before applying.
• Less toggling between different devices.
• Generates configuration history
• Helps with verification of configuration.

Neutral:

• Doesn't help or hurt verification of expected topology function.
• No context sensitive help in Notepad (do we really need it?).
• Is it truely faster?
• Causes complete verification to occur after configuration is applied rather than incremental verification.

Cons:

• Another window to constantly toggle between.
• No ability to verify between tasks as you go.
• Pasting into wrong device can have devastating effect.

These very just a few ideas in weighing the usage of Notepad during the lab. Any thoughts by anyone? Would you record your entire lab on Notepad? Do you purge or Notepad configuration after each major sections?

Thanks,

Mike