Before You Get Started
WordPress needs PHP and mySQL to run. This tutorial installs via XAMPP, not WAMP or MAMP (Mac), so I will not be going into any details regarding WAMP or MAMP, but some of the things will apply to them as well.
1. Install XAMPP, a Local Server
In order to run any PHP/database application on a local computer, you need a local host (ie. Apache + MySQL). So go and download the most recent version of XAMPP or the version from this tutorial is XAMPP 1.8.3 (Sourceforge Old Versions, Windows Version, 128MB).
[browser-shot width="600" url="http://www.apachefriends.org/index.html"]
I personally disable BitNami, but feel free to include it.
Once installed, move to the next step. You may go ahead and launch the Control Panel, but do not do anything yet. First we must configure the PHP modules to ensure that we have everything set as we need.