index.php

If your XAMPP installation is correct you will not need to rename index.php

If you are running on a Windows OS then you need to set the environment variables to where php and the htdocs folders are, etc;

OK, rather than delete the XAMPP index.php, I've renamed it to iindex.php.

I'm running Win7 and I've set in application/config/config.php the following - $config['base_url'] = 'http://localhost/';

And this remains - $config['index_page'] = 'index.php';

I hope that is right.