In most areas of IT, you can learn only so much from school or certification courses; eventually, it’s crucial to get hands-on experience. And so it is with Windows administration.
Most fields have an experience conundrum to some degree: You need experience to qualify for a particular job, but you can’t get that experience until you have done that job. A great thing about IT, though, is that it’s sometimes possible to do an end run around the problem. In IT, hands-on experience can often be acquired using tools on your own computer or accessible through your current job before you try to get the new job.
Another thing about IT, or more specifically, the techies who work in it, is that we love to play around with new things. Here are eight Windows administration-related projects you can perform either at home or at work to get real hands-on experience. Best of all, you can do all of these very inexpensively, possibly without spending a cent.