Creating a Moodle test site on Windows

The Moodle software can be installed on any platform on any machine, the only requirements are webserver software with php and an sql database. To evalute Moodle I installed it in on an old Windows 95 PC in my office. As recommended in the Windows installation documentation I donwloaded a copy of EasyPHP, which is a neat little package that will install the Apache webserver software, PHP and MySQL database software all at once and provides a neat little interface to control them with. The downside is that a lot of the dialogues are in french :( though the Moodle docs provide a quick translation of OK, Next, Start, etc, and since there seems little need to alter the default settings, it doesn't really matter too much.

So installing EasyPHP was pretty easy: I ran the installer .exe file, clicked though the french dialogues and there's webserver, PHP and MySQL up and running. The only thing to do before I could install Moodle itself was to create a database for it use. Again this was pretty easy, it was just a case of finding the database admin section of the EasyPHP admin page and hitting the create new button.

Installing Moodle was simply a case of downloading the software, unzipping it into the webserver documents directory and running the config script from a browser, exactly as described in the Moodle installation instructions. That was it, a complete, working Moodle system that anyone on the sub-net could access by pointing a browser at the Windows PCs IP.

I began creating some course pages, uploading stuff and generally mucking around with Moodle. It became apparent very quickly though that the test system was unbearable slow because, seemingly, of the specifications of the PC, which had only 64mb of RAM and a PII 266 (I think) processor. Another 64mb of RAM donated from another aging PC gave Moodle a noticeable speed bump, but it was still frustratingly slow. I tried things like dropping the display res and number of colours in the Windows control panels, but it didn't really help. The slow speed of the system made it pretty useless for evaluation purposes, and if more than one person tried to access the system at once it came to a grinding halt. I decided then to scrub Windows completely and stick on a Unix OS instead, in the hope that not having a big graphical OS might free up resources for the webserver & PHP.