I have long been an advocate in setting up a test environment. Test environments can come in a variety of forms, from second websites in a different database to VMWare installations that replicate your entire server setup. From Drupal a local installation on your system can be had easily enough with either the built in IIS or a combined tool like XAMMP. Of the two, the community seems to like the combined tool approach the most.

This is important for you to understand, Apache, MySQL, PHP... these are not Drupal. These are the web, database and language backend you need to use Drupal. You must learn to understand the differences between these and how to use those technologies support resources to help you troubleshoot and identify issues.

The instructions on the XAMMP site are certainly sufficient to get you started so I will only outline them now.

1. Go to the XAMMP website
2. Scroll down and click on the appropriate link for your environment. In our case, XAMMP for Windows
3. In my case, I choose the Self-extracting ZIP archive
4. I extracted it to my USB drive. E:\XAMMP in this case and is covered in detail ON THE XAMMP WEBSITE here.
5. Now this method gives me the convienince of carrying my test environmnet around with me but you can certainly use it off of your hard drive.
6. So, run setup_xampp.bat, this will set your environment variables
7. Then run xampp-portcheck.exe to check your environment. If there are problems, go to the XAMMP website for information on troubleshooting them. This would not be a Drupal problem now. You should see something like
• ***************************************************************
• * XAMPP PortCheck v1.2 *
• * *
• * (c) 2005 Carsten Wiedmann *
• * *
• * This script uses openport.exe: *
• * (c) 2003 DiamondCS *
• ***************************************************************
• Please wait a moment...
• RESULT
• ------
• Service Port Status
• ===============================================================
• Apache (HTTP) 80 free
• Apache (WebDAV) 81 free
• Apache (HTTPS) 443 free
• MySQL 3306 free
• FileZilla (FTP) 21 free
• FileZilla (Admin) 14147 free
• Mercury (SMTP) 25 free
• Mercury (POP3) 110 free
• Mercury (IMAP) 143 free
• Press to continue.
8. If everything is ok, then run xampp-control.exe
9. Start Apache and MySQL
• If you like you can start Mercury as well but I never do
10. Browse to http://localhost
11. Welcome to the XAMPP screen, select your language

Go to phpMyAdmin, inthe left hand column, click the little [SQL] box and update the cache settings.
Update MySQL cache