General help

If you want to use XAMPP

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Windows_installation_using_XAMPP

and

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=73852

explain the main part. There are some important things you need to check:

1) The location of XAMPP - I have the webroot in C:\xampp\htdocs - installing XAMPP inside Program Files or User files does not necessarely work on Vista.

2) When you have installed XAMPP you should make sure that Apache and MySQL are running and visit http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 and use phpMyAdmin to create a new mysql user (Priviledges - > Add a new user) with global priviledges, create a new database (Select MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci and Create new database using the selected collation) and change the security settings of your XAMPP. You need to know dbname, dbuser and dbpass because Vista can't create database and config.php for you - you need to create them manually and place the config.php to your moodle folder (what ever name it has). Attached an example of config.php - you may edit it with notepad or WordPad but some more advanced text editor like notepad++ is more secure for whitespaces on Windows environment.

3) Check also the security or sharing tab of your moodledata folder - all users of your Vista need to be able to write to moodledata folder (name does not have to be moodledata and the folder can be almost anywhere)

Finally visiting http://localhost/yourmoodlefolder should start the install procedure...