Hello,
The following is intended to be a complete guide for getting up and running on Ruby on Rails, Heroku, git and the other supporting players on Windows XP. I wrote this guide because I was excited about Heroku but I could not get it to work. I started in a virtual machine running ubuntu but couldn’t get the gems to work. Then I tried cygwin and that didn’t work. Finally I found a couple of key posts that solved the windows install. The following is not of my own technical expertise. It is merely a compilation of what was found via some Google searches and the results of my trials and errors.
Recalibrate 
Hi, thanks for setting this up. I’m new to ruby on rails and trying to install in for windows xp. It helped me actually.