There is a quick update from the main PHP website discussing the improvements to the "Installation and Configuration" section of the PHP manual.

The latest online version of the PHP Manual contains a completely reorganized Installation and Configuration part, which is now splitted up by platforms and servers to ease your first steps with PHP. The manual Windows installation instructions are completely revised, and now suggest you to set environment variables instead of moving files. This way upgrades and configuration changes become more easier.

Hereby we would like to kindly ask everyone who published an article or howto about installing PHP on Windows to revise those instructions according to our latest guide. These new instructions got distributed with PHP 5.0.1 in both the source code and binary versions, and will continue to be shipped with future versions of PHP.