You can save a lot of time and install Apache, PHP, MySQL together in just a few clicks. There is a great comparison of WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) packages:
Comparison of WAMPs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some of them are very simple. For example, using
http://www.witsuite.com/product/installer/ (my favorite) you can install Apache, MySQL and PHP in a very few clicks. Watch the demo if you think that this is not possible :-)