To get a bit more speed out of your sluggish windows development machine (I use wampserver), add the following code to your php.ini.

; APC accellerator
extension=php_apc.dll
[APC]
apc.enabled = 1
apc.cache_by_default = 1
apc.enable_cli = 0
apc.shm_segments = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.max_file_size = 1M
apc.stat=1

Also download the APC dll from here…

http://pecl4win.php.net/ext.php/php_apc.dll

and place it in your php ‘ext’ dir. Mine is here…
D:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.6\ext

Restart Apache and you should be a bit zippier.