The task I was trying to achieve was the installation of development versions of WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki and Moodle, all of which would require a MySQL database. Trying to load the MySQL extension should have been a simple case of uncommenting the line in the php.ini and restarting the Apache service. With Vista, this was certainly not the case.

I set up a very simple page detailing the php configuration in an index.php file:

< ?php phpinfo(); ?>

This showed me the default configuration path of my php.ini and extensions directory, amongst a whole host of other information.

In both cases the paths were incorrect. First and foremost the configuration file path stated C:\Windows when in fact I had installed it in the root (C:\PHP5). So, although I was amending the php.ini file with the correct detail, Vista was using the default values. If there is no php.ini file in Windows, then you’ll continue banging your head against a brick wall.

The problems didn’t stop there. Moving the php.ini file to the Windows directory under Vista isn’t a simple copy and paste task. You need to be administrator. But Vista’s administrator priviledges are more pseudo than actual! In order to amend and save the php.ini file in the Windows directory, you must run Notepad as administrator and save the file as such. Voila! Everything then works. The phpinfo() function returned the correct installation detail and I could continue with the job I was meant to be doing.

PS. Thanks to Rob Douglas for his help.