Running Drupal on Windows using WAMP

I haven't actively administered Drupal on Windows, and in fact had never installed WAMP before creatingDrupal Essential Training. The course includes a nine-minute "Installing WAMP and Drupal on Windows" video, but here are some additional tips I've discovered since the course was released.

• Increase PHP's memory settings or you might have problems backing up and restoring your Drupal site. You'll see the issue if you go to the MySQL-controlling phpMyAdmin screen (probably athttp://localhost/phpMyAdmin) and click "Import": The maximum file size allowed is 2,048K. That's only 2MB, and the databases for most Drupal sites are much larger than that. (The example site for Drupal Essential Training gets as big as 5MB.) To change this limit:
  1. Click the WAMP icon in your system tray.
  2. Select "PHP". In the side menu, select "php.ini" to open a file containing PHP's configuration options.
  3. Search for the line, "upload_max_filesize = 2M".
  4. Change it to "upload_max_filesize = 32M" (or whatever you like).
  5. Save the file and restart WAMP. (Better yet, restart your computer entirely to be sure. I'm frankly not sure whether it makes a difference.)
  6. Now go back to that "Import" screen in phpMyAdmin: You should notice that the limit has changed. (Thanks to L.H. for pointing this out.)
• L.H. writes: "In Windows Vista, the WAMP icon disappears from the system tray after x time (not sure about the duration protocols). To make the WAMP icon re-appear (so that you can access localhost, phpmyadmin, php.ini, etc.), you have to activate the "start WAMP server" icon (from start menu, desktop or wherever); then the system tray icon reappears. Pain in the chicken, but that's Vista."