IIS on Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Laptops are the latest IN thing these days… rather, it has become a NEED than just a WANT. Recently, due the increased competition and cheap technology, more and more people can afford it. But there’s one realtime problem. Most of the affordable laptops come with Windows XP Home Edition, which doesn’t include Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) by default. But since Microsoft is not very good at restricting people from messing with its OS, there’s a way-out for this as well. Here’s how you can do it too…

1. Open the file “C:\WINDOWS\INF\SYSOC.INF” in notepad.
2. Under the section [Components] find the following line.
   iis=iis.dll,OcEntry,iis.inf,hide,7
3. change it to this
   iis=iis2.dll,OcEntry,iis2.inf,,7
4. Get the files iis.dl_ and iis.in_ from win2k professional CD.
5. From command prompt run following commands.
   “EXPAND IIS.DL_ IIS2.DLL”
   “EXPAND IIS.IN_ IIS2.INF”
   place
   IIS2.INF in C:\WINDOWS\INF and
   IIS2.DLL in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SETUP
   
6. Now go to “Control Panel >> Add or Remove Programs >> Add/Remove Windows Components“, you’ll be able to check/uncheck Internet Information Server.(I was unable to do it with Windows XP Professional CD but Win2K Professional CD did the magic for me)

7. You’ll require Win2K Professional CD for the initial part of installation and Windows XP Home Edition CD (You can browse to C:\i386 if its the default installation of XP on your laptop)
   
   
8. Now go to “Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Internet Services Manager >> Directory Security (tab)” and click on “Edit” button under Anonymous Access. Select “Edit” again and select any user account on your laptop. (See the attached image for reference. I used “Guest” account and it worked for me. You should know the windows login password for that user account)



9. Now open http://localhost in IE or Firefox. There you go!!!

I tried this thing on my HP Pavillion dv4050EA laptop. My requirement was to run PHP on IIS which I managed to do successfully. However, I was unable to run ASP… maybe I was missing something. I won’t recommend this unless its inevitable. (For example, a few of my clients need to run PHP on IIS (& MySQL) in their Win2K environment and I had to coordinate PHP installation with them over msn since I had no access to their secure intranet. )

Happy Experimenting!!!
(Please don’t hold me responsible if anything goes wrong… Its entirely on your own risk, if you want to take it. As noone knows when Bill Gates thinks of patching it up with some update. I, however, found this risk worth taking.)