Hi,
I’ve been trying to set up a server on Windows Vista but having downloaded php mysql and apache I couldn’t get it to function.
My next effort was to download WAMP onto a shared windows xp pc. Everything went fine until I clicked the icon to open WAMP. An hourglass popped up for a few seconds then disappeared, nothing else happened. I don’t know what to do next or why WAMP isn’t loading. I thought setting up on XP was supposed to be easy.
Please can somebody help me get this running?
The easiest approach for setting up a dev environment is to grab a pre-configured package. XAMPP is one of the more popular ones these days.
Go ahead and uninstall whatever you’ve installed so far, and then install and configure XAMPP (the windows version). There’s a setup guide on their site, which is simple and straight forward.
I agree with the suggestion for xampp. It works very well and is ready to go from the start.
You won’t see much from the server after it’s started 
Most probably it will only display a small icon near the clock in the bottom-rught corner.
Once you started the server, fire-up your browser and type localhost in for the URL.
I suggest looking into WAMPServer (http://www.wampserver.com/) as I find it easier to use then XAMPP.