subdomains and such

how do i make like a virtual subdomain that simply points to another folder like: cool.mydomain.com on apache (by the way I run windows) points to mydomain.com/cool/ and also virtual directories that point elsewhere on my hard drive aside from the /htdocs folder (e.g www.mydomain.com/pages ("pages" in C:\webstuff\pages\home.html") / home.html ????

Thanks!

>> how do i make like a virtual subdomain

Make sure cool.mydomain.com is resolvable. More than likely you are trying to configure name-based vhost, so cool.mydomain.com should be resolved to the same IP as your default domain. Then go on and configure vhosts. Don't ask how, just do a search and try it first.

>> virtual directories that point elsewhere on my hard drive

You can use Alias when you are trying to serve your contents from a location not under your docroot.