Ken's Tech Note

After upgrading / reinstalling Windows and commonly use software on a PC, I ran into a problem of unable to get XAMPP to run properly. It's a virgin Windows Vista with 7-Zip, Skype, FileZilla, K-Lite Codec, Firefox, Thunderbird... essentially non-server-related apps. Then I installed XAMPP with the aim to set up a small testing environment for simple PHP applications. However, Apache refuses to start, complaining that port 80/443 were in use. Windows Firewall has been configured properly to allow Apache to run. On browsing 127.0.0.1, the browser returns a blank page (but not an error). It turns out that Skype by default will use port 80 and 443. So it is blocking other applications such as Apache to use these 2 ports exclusively. Turning off the 2 ports in Skype solved the problem. It is also interesting to note that MSN Live Messenger uses port 80/443 as well. But Live Messenger/Windows Messenger was removed after the virgin installation.