Thank you very much for your reply.....it turns out i found, with using mozilla, that the server actually times out....that made me think..."its trying to connect" so i disabled the windows firewall altogether and whala! it could open up the xampp main window from my laptop. so i reenabled the firewalla and enabled a rule in both incoming and outgoing to allow 80 and 443 ports...no issues there! thank you for your response.
Now moving on to the second issue....i can pull my localhost and xampp/index.php screen just fine but when i try to pull my website from a completely different diretory (i.e. NOT htdocs) i am getting an access forbidden error error 403...not sure why
here is what my vhost file looks like
NameVirtualHost 192.168.2.4:80
<VirtualHost localhost>
ServerAdmin
myemail@yomama.net DocumentRoot "c:/xampp/htdocs"
ServerName localhost
<Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost horizonpt>
ServerAdmin
myemail@yosisatamama.com DocumentRoot "E:/My Web/horizonpt"
ServerName horizonpt
<Directory "E:/My Web/horizonpt">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
anyideas?