maudibler wrote:I made a new directory temp it has a simple one line html index page. when i navigate to localhost/temp i just get an error ??
The new directory has to be put under the so called "DocumentRoot" (this is the base directory of your localhost Server for storing HTML and PHP files etc.) and for Xampp this is in c:/xampp/htdocs. So if you like to use
http://localhost/temp, you have to create c:/xampp/htdocs/temp on your disk and put your files there.
maudibler wrote:so I went to the wordpress directory and deleted everything and then put in my index.html file. So now when I go to localhost/wordpress its my index file that works !
Yes, of course (see above). I think it is a good idea if you go for some documentation and tutorials, how Apache works and how to configure it, this will answer many many questions.
P.S.: "I get an error" is not a very a good description. Each error has a message and most of them an error number, please provide these informations instead of the abstract "i get an error".