Go to http://jakarta.apache.org, follow the links to the download page, and download the binary of the most recent version of Tomcat 5. Get the right version for your system. For Windows this is an exe file. It's a 10MB download.

Unpack the file you downloaded (if a zip or gz file). Run the file if it is an exe file. You'll need to provide the admin password on Windows. Accepting all the defaults works fine, although it is a Very Good Idea to install into a directory called “ c5” instead of the default. The default pathname is way too long and contains embedded spaces, so you have to quote it every place you use it.

The last step in the installation asks you if you want to start Tomcat. You do. You can also stop and start Tomcat manually on WinXP through Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance/Administrative Tools/Services/Apache Tomcat.

After you have started Tomcat, browse http://localhost:8080 If everything went smoothly, you will see a page served back to you by Tomcat that looks like this: