Be very careful when using XAMPP on your machines. The reason it works so well is because it was intended for testing only. It is wide open with all default passwords and is very insecure. WAMP on the other hand is intended to be secure and used as a standard server.

Apache2triad is a really great alternative. Install it and make the same changes to the php.ini as noted above (have to use notepad since there is not an interface like WAMP). Triad has mail and ftp integrated and is secured while see more installing. I use this for testing Dolphin updates before deploying them on my live server.