Here i copied some text on the installation file thatr comes with php. One thing is sure you dont need to compile gd and freetype on windows
Installation of Windows extensions
After installing PHP and a webserver on Windows, you will
probably want to install some extensions for added functionality.
The following table describes some of the extensions available. As
described in the manual installation steps, you can choose which
extensions you would like to load when PHP starts by uncommenting the:
extension=php_*.dll' lines in php.ini.
(uncomment the extension=php_gd2.dll)
ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
Some extra DLLs are required for some PHP extensions. Please copy the
bundled dlls from the 'dlls/' directory in distribution package to your
windows/system (Win9.x) or winnt/system32 (WinNT, Win2000, XP) directory.
If you already have these DLLs installed on your system,
overwrite them only if something is not working correctly.
Before overwriting them, it is a good idea to backup them or move them to
another folder - just in case something goes wrong.
Download the latest version of the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC)
for your platform, especially Microsoft Windows 9x/NT4 users.
MDAC is available at http://www.microsoft.com/data/ .
Also note that some extensions need 3rd party libraries,
e.g. php_oci8.dll needs the Oracle 8 client libraries to be installed
on your system. These are not bundled with PHP distribution.
ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
The DLLs for PHP extensions are prefixed with 'php_'. This
prevents confusion between PHP extensions and their supporting
libraries.
Note:
In PHP 4.0.5 MySQL, ODBC, FTP, Calendar, BCMath, COM, PCRE,
Session, WDDX and XML support is built-in. You don't need to
load any additional extensions in order to use these functions.
Examples of PHP Extensions
php_dbase.dll dBase functions
php_filepro.dll Read-only access to Filepro databases
php_gd.dll GD library functions for GIF manipulation
php_hyperwave.dll HyperWave functions
php_imap.dll IMAP functions
php_ldap.dll LDAP functions
php_mssql.dll MSSQL client (requires MSSQL DB-Libraries)
php_snmp.dll SNMP get and walk functions (NT only!)
php_zlib.dll ZLib compression functions
For more information see the section about Windows extensions at
http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.php#install.windows.extensions
Also check the extension_dir on php.ini make sure that it points to the extension dir on the directory where you installed PHP.
Hope this helps