I wanted to do a quick proof of concept for my colleagues at work so I installed the open source trinity Apache/PHP/MySQL on my Win2k machine at work using EasyPHP. EasyPHP is an excellent application that installs all of the applications and is controlled via an icon in the task bar. It's very cool. The site is in French, but all you have to do is download the installer and run it. If you want to edit Apache's httpd.conf or php.ini, you can do it from from the system tray icon. You can also restart all the services from there. You can also do command line mysql using a dos prompt (goto: Start > Run > "cmd" ... then cd to the MySQL directory and execute "mysql"). Very cool.

I then installed WinCron and Lynx so I could use drupal. Voila. An almost cool server. Of course it's cooler if you run it on Linux or Mac OS X.