Well I’ve finally sorted out the server part, and it is pretty easy really. Once you’ve got XAMPP installed, you’re down to two buttons one to start Apache, Mysql and php while the other is to terminate the actions. Once you’re running the actual server online, then you can start playing around. The files should go within the XAMPP folder in your root directory, ie C/apachefriends/xampp/htdocs/…. whatever you want after that is fail game really. This all really does come into it’s own when you install wordpress as you would install it normally on your actual ftp server, and you can see you tweaks and what not straight away,…which is nice. Configuring and Using the Apache HTTP Web Server on a Windows XP PC

Well this does article does seem to go into a bit of detail in terms of how to configure everything, but it pretty simple to follow, which should help us understand what we’re doing with XAMPP.