Hardware and performance

Hi there, I made a post in the installation issues area but my query isn't an actuall moodle problem as such but a query about the install package itself as well as reccommendations request.

Having recently downlaoded the Moodle 1.7.1+ windows installer package I appear to have a problem with the package install.

1) Has the contents of the packaged recently changed? I installed the same package on another machine several weeks ago and the readme_en seems to have changed from ApacheFriends XAMPP Lite version 1.5.3a to ApacheFriends XAMPPlite (basic package) version 1.5.5

2) Within the readme_en file in the moodle folder it says "Step 1: Unpack the package into a directory of your choice. Please start the
"setup_XAMPPlite.bat" and beginning the installation." however on my machine the 'setup_xampp' file which I presume the instructions are referring to doesn't seem to be associated with any application / program to run the file. The symbol for the file looks exactly the same as the symbol for a when you have a file on your machine that doesn't have a compatible application to open the file with, does this make sense?

3) I also notice in the readme_en file it says the following "As mentioned before, XAMPPlite is not meant for production use but only for developers in a development environment. The way XAMPPlite is configured is to be open as possible and allowing the developer anything he/she wants. For development environments this is great but in a production environment it could be fatal. Here a list of missing security
in XAMPPlite:" Does this mean the installer isn't suitable for running the Moodle environment in full on a host / client server?

4) From the install instructions it seems that you have to continually start and stop both apache and mysql in order for moodle to run? Can these not be set to run auto in the background on a machine, if you were to install the package on a server you shouldn't have to keep running each service?

5) I have also noticed that in the instructions it says
"Step 4: PHP (with mod_php, as *.php, *.php3, *.php4, *.phtml), Perl by default with *.cgi, SSI with *.shtml are all located in => C:\XAMPPlite\htdocs\" but there isn't a htdocs folder within the moodle directory. Therefore even though both apache and php have been insatlled can you not run html or php pages through localhost / 127.0.0.1?

Finally
6) There doesn't appear to be an obvious way of accessing phpmyadmin, is this correct as again its mentioned in the readme_en file?


Thanks for anyone who can help with the above questions