Go to http://www.apachefriends.org/ and click on XAMPP for Windows. Scroll down and download the latest version of XAMPP Lite. If you're not very familiar with these tools, you should download the EXE and not the ZIP. Double-click the EXE as soon as it has been downloaded. You should see the following window:

Click Install to start the installation process; it will take a while as it extracts quite a lot of files. You can install XAMPP in your program directory C:\Program Files but it won't work on Vista unless you modify some privileges. If you don't feel comfortable changing your security settings, just use C:\ instead.

After the installation has completed you'll see an old fashioned console window asking a few questions. They look like this; you can confirm all default values:

At the end you'll see a menu where you can execute different actions. You'll later have to start the XAMPP Control Panel but let's leave this screen untouched for now; we have to make one modification first.

Before you start XAMPP, you should change one MySQL setting. MySQL table names are not case sensitive on Windows. This will cause some problems if you want to move your site to a Linux server where MySQL is by default set up with case sensitive table names. It's therefore recommended to change this, if you work with concrete5:

Go to the directory where you've installed XAMPP, open mysql and then bin. It should look like the following:

The my.ini file contains several settings related to MySQL. Open the file and locate the section mysqld and insert the following line:

lower_case_table_names = 0

The first lines should then look like the following:

# Example MySQL config file for medium systems.
#
# This is for a system with little memory (32M - 64M) 
# where MySQL plays an important part, or systems 
# up to 128M where MySQL is used together with
# other programs (such as a web server)
#
# You can copy this file to
# /etc/my.cnf to set global options,
# mysql-data-dir/my.cnf to set server-specific options 
# (in this installation this directory is @localstatedir@)
# or
# ~/.my.cnf to set user-specific options.
#
# In this file, you can use all long options that a 
# program supports.
# If you want to know which options a program supports, 
# run the program with the "--help" option.

# The following options will be passed to all MySQL clients
[client]
#user       = your_username
#password   = your_password
host        = .
port        = 3306
socket      = "MySQL"

# Here follows entries for some specific programs

# The MySQL server
[mysqld]
lower_case_table_names  = 0
basedir                 = "C:/xampplite/mysql/"
datadir                 = "C:/xampplite/mysql/data/"
port        = 3306
socket      = "MySQL"
skip-locking
key_buffer              = 16M
max_allowed_packet      = 1M
table_cache             = 64
sort_buffer_size        = 512K
net_buffer_length       = 8K
read_buffer_size        = 256K
read_rnd_buffer_size    = 512K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M

Now that MySQL is properly configured, go back to the XAMPP console menu and enter 1 to open the control panel where you can start and stop all components. You should see the following window:

Start both Apache and MySQL, and your web server will be up and running in no time, ready for concrete5!

If everything worked you should be able to open your browser and enter http://localhost/. On this screen you can select your preferred language and you'll see a nice status page about XAMPP.