Cannot install WordPress using XAMPP

I am new to wordpress.org, I thought I would try self hosting as I already have a free blog.

All I have managed to do (by following numerous guides online) is install XAMPP, start Apache and MySQL on (but I get error reports regarding Port 80 and Port 443, so I changed the LISTENING code in https.conf as suggested on an old discussion on this forum)… The next step on all the guides is to install WordPress by going to localhost/wordpress after creating a database, username and password, and changing the files to your new database name etc.

When I got to localhost/wordpress after copying the WordPress files to htdocs, I get the Index of/wordpress page… If I add index.html or index.php I get -Object not found!’ And Error 404.

I don’t have World Wide Web Publishing Services under my computer management section so I can’t turn it off like other suggested solutions.

The # wasn’t there when I tried to delete the # in front of the line ‘LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so’ in the httpd.conf file, so this isn’t the cause either.

I have checked whether index.php and index.html were included under <IfModule dir_module> in the httpd.conf file, and they were.

Also, I changed ‘AllowOverride None’ to ‘AllowOverride All’ as it was suggested as a solution too!

Nothing has worked, what can I do to install WordPress?

Using Windows 8.1