puphpet.com NOT puppet. Xampp is an out dated, amatuer solution to a problem better solved with vms. With puphpet.com there is few reasons other than laziness and unwillingness to learn new things not to use it. Not to mention learning to use a vm is a skill that persists across all languages. Xampp is a very limited solution only suited for the simplest of tasks because once you begin working on projects that include multiple layers of technology including extensions working directly on a host windows os via xamp becomes problematic. For example, if a project were to have a dependency on imagick or oauth you would need to install those with xampp. That is a very tricky task. On the other hand, if you were running a vm on puphpet is would be a mater of adding a few lines to a configuration. The same for other common technologies like ruby, node, several search systems, etc.
Also like I mentioned before if you have existing projects that are not on production servers with php 7 your introducing a significant amount of risk working on those projects in php 7 locally. Your local development environment should always be a close, mirror of the production environment. Running 7 locally and pushing to a server with 5.x is a HUGE difference likely to result inconsistencies and unseen errors until its to late. I would find it hard to believe you don’t have existing projects that are running on 5.x.