Questions (Win-XAMPP vs. VM-LAMP)

[vanarie]

I've been programming in PHP for years but am not a hard core *NIX person. I know enough to get around and am used to using VirtualMin (webmin) to do most of the administration. Anyway, I have a few questions maybe you can help out with.

I'm testing on a local install of WinServer2008. Forgive me if some of these are listed in an FAQ. Somewhere, but I did read through them.

1) I've tried both VM-LAMP and also XAMPP. I'm not sure what the advantages are, but I'm assuming that with XAMPP, you can't use any of the usual Linux based shell commands, crontab, etc. Which would be more stable in a production environment, running a VM-LAMP or XAMPP?

2) Since XAMPP is running on top of WinServer, I assume that it can take advantage of the "full" resources of the OS, vs running inside a VM memory sandbox. Might this make it better for a production server?

3) I'm used to running crontab to schedule jobs. If I was to use Windows Scheduler to do the same, can you give me some examples that would run php scripts every 5 minutes, etc.? A whitepaper, if it exists, would be great!

4) In regards to WebMin, is there a comparable GUI that works with XAMPP?

Thanks!