Newbie ques re XAMPP Control Panel

[MightyMouse58]

Hi guys,

I'm new to XAMPP. I've successfully installed it on to a Windows 7 platform and all appears to be good. But I'd like confirmation of the following: should I check the boxes against Apache and MySQL to have them start as Windows Services? Or should I leave them alone? What are the pros and cons?

This is a local web server setup on my machine so I can develop and test dynamic websites.

Help appreciated.

Carl