Drupal Installation in Windows environment is fairly simply and easy. If you are running a WAMP server or standalone packages, you can set up your first drupal site in matter of few minutes. If you need to set up Apache, PHP, MySQL you can read and configure you window's system here.
This article assumes that you are configuring Drupal 6.x Installation in your Windows Environment.
Download the latest version of Drupal from http://drupal.org. I am using drupal 6.15 for my test purpose. You will get a tarball file, Extract the contents of the tarball using WinRAR or WinZip or any other file decompresser application.
Assuming you have initially configured the Apache and PHP, you can copy the extracted contents to your webroot folder. Since I don't use the defualt webroot, I changed it to C:\Projects\ and make the changes in Apache's configuration file to read the webroot/Document Directory as C:\Projects\
Also, as I use IIS web server for my other projects I changed the Apache port to listen to port 90 rather than the default 80. This is not necessary if you are running only Apache Web Server.
Once you have copied the extracted files to your Apache Document root, you need to do a few housekeeping thing before you can actually install drupal in your system.
Go to [YourDrupalFolder]\sites\default and make a copy of default.settings.php. Rename the copied file as settings.php. --- This is Important.
If you want to use the clean URLs feature of drupal you need to edit your Apache Web Configuration file httpd.conf to enable that feature. Clean URLs are nice feature that allows the webspiders to crawl the site smoothly for indexing. In layman terms, it will simply allow browser address bar to read as http://www.example.com/node/1/ rather than http://www.example.com/?q=node/1.
