Originally the plan was to wait for Windows 10 to be a little more established before I took the jump and upgraded my work laptop (Windows 7) to Microsoft’s latest wunderkind (Windows 10). However, I got a little too excited (plus, free is always so attractive, isn’t it?), that I ended up jumping in and doing the upgrade as soon as my notification arrived! (So much for self control in other words).
(For interest’s sake, the upgrade went smoothly, though I had to uninstall a few applications and switch off a few startup apps for the best result. First impression? I really, really like it.)
Anyway, I did immediately hit my first snag when firing up XAMPP – the web server Apache failed to load, with the resulting message appearing in the console: Port 80 in use by “Unable to open process”.
netstat wasn’t much better at identifying the process locking up port 80 (also reporting “unable to identify process owner”), though the PID of 4 it returned did give a clue that it was probably a service currently using the port.
So I fired up the Services control panel (search “Services” using the search button next to the Windows button) and narrowed my search to all automated start services seeing as port 80 seemed to be locked at Windows start up already.
Knowing that port 80 is usually an internet related port, the services listing quickly threw up a likely suspect: W3SVC, otherwise known as World Wide Web Publishing Service.
It’s the service that provides the connectivity for Microsoft’s built in Internet Information Services Manager, but seeing as I want to use Apache for my web server, it’s quite safe to disable it.
Or as I did in my case, simply stop it and switch it’s startup type to manual.
Firing up XAMPP’s control panel confirmed that all was now well as Apache happily and greedily gobbled up port 80 as it started up!
Related Link: XAMPP