Optimize MySQL
The default my.ini leaves a lot of options open for improvement.
Disable DNS Lookups add this to your my.ini
skip-name-resolve
Settings to optimize:
table_cache
tmp_table_size
query_cache_size
key_buffer_size
read_buffer_size
read_rnd_buffer_size
sort_buffer_size
MySQL Administrator
A handy GUI tool that allows you to see the queires being run, buffer usage, connection usage, and more.
Also useful for generating backups and finding the status of variables.
You can download MySQL Administrator and other GUI tools for windows at
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html
Open Files Limit controls the number of files MySQL can use.
Generally I would do tablecache * 2.5 to get the number of open files to set the limit to.
Windows has a strict limit of of 2048 open files which kind of sucks if you have many tables.