There are many solution available for running git on your windows machine, but this is the setup that I find most useful: msysgit with putty.

1. First download the latest putty (using the installer) and install it. If you want to download the executables directly, you also have to download plink.exe.
2. Download the latest msysgit and install it. During installation it will ask to choose the SSH executable. If putty is installed correctly it will have detected it, otherwise you have to select the ‘Use (Tortoise)Plink’ option and use the button to select the plink executable on your system (when using the default putty installer this will be ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe’).
3. Now you can start using git and use pageant for public-private key authentication!

Some other tips:

• If you set the plink executable incorrectly, you can change it in the setup.ini in your git installation directory. Mine looks like this:

  [Environment]
  GIT_SSH=C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe
  SVN_SSH=C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe

• If you want to open git bash on a directory from a tool such as FreeCommander, you can use the following command (replacing the directory to Git if you have installed it somewhere else of course):

  C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\sh.exe" --login -i"