The Acquia Stack is a bundling of PHP, MySQL, and Apache, based on XAMP, made spefically for doing Drupal development.  The Acquia Stack simplifies the installation and configuration of a Drupal capable environment.

After installing the Acquia Stack, be sure to configure the Apache configuration file, located in the a directory called "conf", which is located under the main Apache directory.  Be sure to configure is the Virtual Hosts section of httpd.conf, so that Apache can service your sites.

If running on Windows, be sure to modify the "hosts" file located in  \Windows\System32\drivers\etc.  Ad any host names and appropriate IPs that you would like to use, and comment out the line:"::1  localhost" by placing a "#" in at the beginning of the line.  Commenting out this line is important, otherwise you may get the dreaded "HTTP Request Status" error on the Drupal Status Report.

By default, the Acquia Drupal Stack ships with the Apache port set to 8082. For many users, it makes sense to change this to port 80, by modifying the http.conf file, with the directive "Listen 80" rather than "Listen 8082". This way you can type "localhost" into your browsers address bar, rather than "localhost:8082". You should also change the ServerName directive to "ServerName 127.0.0.1:80".