Umbraco CMS: Manual Installation

Question

I am using Windows Vista Ultimate and I want to install Umbraco CMS, with which I have no previous experience.
Common installation methods i.e. Installing either via Microsoft Webmatrix or Web Platform Installer didn't work for me. The former is for 7 and 8 versions of Windows and the latter downloads all installation files but fails to install. That is it shows "Installing ..." dialog for over 3 hours that makes me to forcefully end the installation. So all efforts have to be done from scratch (including download of the installation components using Web Platform Installer).
Is there a way to manually install Umbraco without the help of Platform Installer? I have downloaded seperately the files needed for Vista(e.g. Umbraco 7xxx.zip,Powershell 2, ASP.NET MVC, etc.). I don't see any executable in the package for Umbraco. There are just DLL's which I don't know where to copy to, as well as many aspx and ascx files that I don't know what to do with.

Answer 1

http://our.umbraco.org/contribute/releases shows the latest and all other available umbraco releases.

Under the 'Current' heading, you will find links to the most recent stable release detail page where you can grab UmbracoCms.X.X.X.zip which are all the files you need to go through the process manually.

One of the absolute best things about umbraco is that it's so easy to spin up a new isntall this way!

Important! Before you unzip - be sure to right-click the .zip file and open the properties page. There will be an option to "Unblock" - be sure to click this or you may well experience issues with the dlls.

Unzip these files to where your webroot will be, set-up your IIS site and open in your browser - umbraco will automatically pick up that you need to do 'the install' and take you through a few simple steps that set-up the database and your admin credentials. There are no exe's or installer files - it's all embedded, more-or-less, in the site. A good practice is the remove the [/install/] folder once you've gone through these steps. Umbraco has some installation documentation here if you want to see all the various ways and steps available to install an umbraco site. -I prefer the .zip way described above, but you can also go the NuGet route too.