AMPPS

I've used a number of WAMP and MAMP stacks over the years, and of all of them, AMPPS has been the MOST DIFFICULT to use and most time-consuming to troubleshoot. It would have been faster and easier to just install Apache and MySQL from scratch.

• Really, REALLY difficult to have the htdocs anywhere other than where AMPPS wants it. (This would have been a deal-breaker if I knew it in advance, because it makes it useless for me on my work PC.)
• This is the ONLY stack I've used that has trouble grabbing port 80 from the various Windows system processes that always seem to want to use it.
• The Softaculous installer seems like a nice thing at first, but it insists on prefixing your database tables which makes it useless as a prototyping tool.

Overall recommendation: Pick something else.

for one can't change php versions. its stuck on 5.3 (EW!!!! Should be using 5.5 or higher).

then after a few restarts it automatically has errors in php configs. blah.

This one of the most exclusive and helpfull Apache+MySQL+PhpMyAdmin PHP Server. It includes more than 290 cms and frameworks that can installed in your alias local domain directory in som? seconds. And that`s all containing this stable Web Server.