How to install and configure magento on windows.

Pre-installation Tasks
Before installing magento make sure that you have the following software installed on your system.
-Apache Web Server.
-PHP 5.2.0 or newer version (You need extension of PDO/MySQL, MySQLi, mcrypt, mhash, simplexml, DOM, curl, gd, soap).
-MySQL 4.1.20 or newer.

I, myself have installed XAMPP software(which contains PHP + MySQL + Apache) and then enable extension of necessary addons by uncommenting php.ini file under apache/bin directory. If you don't do it you might have http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/04/installing-magneto-fails-with-php.html

Installing Magento
1)Download magento software from magentocommerce.com/download. You can download.zip or .tar.gz installer package and decompress it with any compression utility.

2)Rename the decompressed folder to magento and place this (magento) folder into your web server directory.

3)Create a mysql database For example name the database magento. Also create username and password for the database.

D:\xampp\mysql\bin>mysql.exe -h localhost -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 7
Server version: 5.1.30-community MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> create database magento;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> create user 'magento' identified by 'magento';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)

mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'magento'@'localhost' identified by 'magento';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)

mysql> commit;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> Bye

Ensure that you can log in to database using newly created user.

D:\xampp\mysql\bin>mysql.exe -h localhost -u magento -p
Enter password: *******
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 18
Server version: 5.1.30-community MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

4)You must have the correct permission onto magento directory in order to proceed. On windows if you have NTFS file system then make sure you have read, write and execute permission on the folder. On unix change the permission to 755 by chmod.

5)Already mentioned that before installing magento you need php 5. However if your server runs on php 4 then you need PHP5 CGI Binary.

6)From your browser write http://localhost/magento. You will get http://localhost/magento/index.php/install/ on the browser and the word "Welcome to Magento's Installation Wizard!"

7)Click on the checkbox if you are agree and proceed to install. And then press Continue.

8)In the localization tab select Locale, Time Zone and Default Currency and then press Continue.

9)In the configuration window fill up the field as indicated. In this step you may face a problem defined here http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/04/magneto-installation-crashes-apache.html. So care about that and note that this step may take few minutes to continue next step.

10)Create Admin Account window will appear. Fill up the necessary information. And press Continue.

11)You have done installation task. A window will appear cotaining word "You're All Set!". Now you can login to admin panel. You can Go to backend or frontend as your wish.
Related Documents
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-installing-magento-cant-log-in-to.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/04/magneto-installation-crashes-apache.html
http://arjudba.blogspot.com/2009/04/after-installing-magento-cant-log-in-to.html