DevShed has a new tutorial on creating your very own VAMP setup - Vista, Apache, MySQL and PHP - running on your local machine.
With the abundance of communication between the browser and a server in these days of AJAX and JSON data interchange, there has never been a better time to get your own development web server set up so that you can test all those dynamic scripts you're writing. This article will show you how to do it using some of the most popular software.
They start by setting up an Apache web server and follow it with PHP first then MySQL second to round out the install. Most of the installers are pretty simple for the Windows-based systems (the developers of them have done a great job) so the install should go pretty smoothly.