This one would be useful especially for people who do web development, but would also be useful to anyone who wishes to host webpages on their PC. I have my PC set up as a web server, not so that I can host sites to the public, but so that I can develop PHP/MySQL code on my machine and run it like I would it a live web server. On one machine, I use IIS, popular server software which comes bundled with Windows XP Pro. However, my laptop comes bundled with Windows XP Home, which does not come with IIS. Furthermore, it would take some hacked workarounds to make IIS work with XP Home (go here for some info if you want to try it out). Microsoft’s official position is that IIS will not work with XP Home.

So, what did I do? I went for Apache. Apache is very popular server software with a great price - free. You can download it by choosing one of the available mirrors. For those of you using Windows, make sure you get the Win32 Binary with the MSI Installer. You can then install it like any normal program which makes it much easier.

A quick note for PHP users: If you wish to install PHP on your computer to run with Apache, there is one quick change which must be made to http.conf. Whereas the PHP Installer can automatically configure IIS, you must make this quick change yourself on Apache. Go to this page for data on the change you need to make.