Safe and secure storage of passwords and other sensitive information is of great concern to every developer. Today I came across some new hash functions built in to the latest release of PHP.

This article is a quick guide to getting PHP 5 running on your Windows machine (be it Windows 98/Me or Windows NT/2000/XP/2003). Note! I advise you remove all files like php.ini and PHP related DLLs from the Windows SYSTEM folder before moving on with a new PHP installation.

1. Download the PHP binaries

PHP is free and comes complete with the source code. If you are not interested in hacking the PHP source code, you can simply download the Windows binaries. Both the binaries and the source code can be found at the PHP website. At the time I wrote this, the relevant PHP binary to download comes in a zip file (PHP 5.1.3 zip package). The Windows installer version does not include the binaries to run PHP5 as an Apache module.