There are two ways to do this. I'll list out both in this post. 1. Backing Up and upgrading Take a backup of your htdocs and data folder (subfolder of mysql folder), reinstall upgrade version and replace those folders. 2. Overwriting the new version Inspired by YAIG(Yet Another IT Guy) 's blog, Here is the how-to version Warning : Do this at your own risk Download the latest version of PHP (zip package not the installer) De-archive it to a directory Copy the contents of the directory in the PHP sub-folder of your XAMPP installation directory, overwriting the files which are already present Now a simple trick: take the files which have a _2 in their names (for example php5apache2_2.dll ), copy them in the apache\bin subdirectory and remove the _2 part, overwriting the existing files.
Tips, Tweaks and Some learning