title: Installing PHP extensions on Windows
body: <p>I am using a Windows XP Home Edition. I need to install a few extensions to PHP -- memcache, APC, .etc. And I would very much like to use PECL to make this happen. The problem is PECL takes it for granted that I will have certain programs on my computer. On another post, I read, for instance, that you need to have Microsoft Visual Studio C++ installed on your machine. However, the new version of Visual Studio, which I downloaded, does not have msdev.exe and instead uses vcbuild.exe, which has a completely different api and fails to compile the .dsp files that come with these modules. </p>
  
  <p>So I tried to find a script that would upgrade the dsp to work with vcbuild.exe...and it turns out vcbuild.exe can do that, but of course that didn't pan out. </p>
  
  <p>Another thing I tried was to find a make script for Windows (nmake2make). But there was no make file in the module's root folder.</p>
  
  <p>I tried also downloading Cygwin and MinGW in hopes of finding a build script that would work as simply as in *nix operating systems, but to no avail. </p>
  
  <p>How else do I use install PHP extensions on a Windows machine? Can anyone help me out of this predicament?</p>