Worried about upgrade

[network23]

I know very little about upgrading PHP and I personally cannot do the installs/upgrades and the IT guy who does doesn't much care for PHP.

Here's the current situation

PHP 4.2.1 on IIS (NT 4)

The original install of PHP took days as we worked to get all the settings to work with IIS. Now that it's running, I am very aprehensive to upgrade to the latest build, but need to for some features that aren't active in 4.2 but are in 4.3.

How can I upgrade to the new version and keep all the settings that now work with IIS with no downtime? Now that we have a running PHP, I cannot afford to spend days, even hours making sure everything is as it was for our entire site will break if we upgrade and PHP doesn't work for some missed setting.

Please advise!

[jerdo]

Install with the zip binary and not the exe, then when you need to upgrade you can just delete the old install and put the new one over it. Make sure you save your php.ini file, or at least the changes you made to it.

[network23]

How does installing with the zip binary differ from the exe?

Is the php.ini the only file that modifications are made to? Do I need to worry about (or are there even any) changes made in other parts of Windows (IIS, services, etc.) that might cause this new version to not work when installed?

[stolzyboy]

most of everything to configure php is in the php.ini regardless of which server you use eg apache, iis, omniweb, etc....