by Bret Miller.
Personally, if I were doing this on Windows, I might actually use IIS instead of Apache. But assuming you are using a WAMP stack, I would tend to install each piece separately for the simple reason that it gives you the flexibility to upgrade each piece separately as you need to, and you will need to over time. There are Windows binary packages available for each of the pieces. MariaDB performance is supposedly better on Windows, so you might consider that over MySQL. It is a drop-in replacement--no changes needed vs MySQL on your part other than to install MariaDB instead.