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I am based in Cheshire, England. I am available for consultation on engineering, business, computing/IT and web issues, and welcome requests to write or proof read articles.

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Wampserver and Windows 10

If you use Wampserver for offline web site development you might have found that upgrading to Windows 10 stops Wampserver from working - the system tray icon remains orange. This is because Windows 10 grabs port 80, which Wampserver Apache wants to use.

If you left click on the Wampserver system tray icon, under "Apache -> Service" if you try to Start/Resume the service or test port 80 you will get the following message

Your port 80 is actually used by :
Server: Microsoft-IIS/10.0
Cannot install the Apache service, please stop this application and try again.

To make port 80 available to Wampserver you need to stop the Microsoft-IIS service. To do this

• Open a command prompt as administrator - hold down the Windows key and press x, then choose "Command prompt (Admin)"
• Type iisreset /stop and press enter

You should see

Attempting stop...
Internet services successfully stopped

You can then left click on the Wampserver icon and go to Apache -> Service -> Start/Resume service and the icon should turn green. I have had to do this a few times recently, each Microsoft has updated my "insider preview" version of Windows 10.

Although the above solution works I found that I had to do it after every Windows upgrade. A permanent solution is to edit the Apache httpd.conf file, found at [drive]:\wamp\bin\apache\apache[ver]\conf\httpd.conf. Change these entries:

Listen 0.0.0.0:80
Listen [::0]:80
and
ServerName localhost:80

to

Listen 0.0.0.0:8383
Listen [::0]:8383
and

Save the file then left click on the Wampserver icon and go to Apache -> Service -> Start/Resume service and the icon should turn green.