While I was performing some extensive WordPress plugin compatibility testing, I was getting frustrated with having to wait for what seemed like an eternity for page refreshes to occur. I did a little Google-ing and found an excellent open-source software package called XAMPP that runs on Windows.
XAMPP screen shot
It lets you run Apache (a web server program), PHP5 (a server programming language), MySql (a database program), FileZilla (an FTP program), and Mercury (an e-mail server program) on your local hard drive running a 32-bit version of Windows. You can manually start the programs/servers or run them as installed services. Here is a good XAMPP installation tutorial.
