Hey 

Thank you for the quick reply. i checked the httpd.conf file and surely enough the "Addhandler" was commented out. i added ur option and then tunrned on CGI in the options directive. I restarted Apache and then launched the browser. now it gives me an internal server error problem. i went into the apache logs and this is the error it shows 
 "The system cannot find the file specified.  : couldn't spawn child process: C:/Documents and Settings/Maddy17/My Documents/mywebsite/env.cgi"
Now i went back to the document root dir and checked if the file was present. the file exists there so i am not sure what to do now.