Running Opencart on local machine

How would I go about configuring opencart without hosting it.  I want to start configuring it for our site now, just on my computer, before we've bought hosting, so I can show my collective the site and make sure they're going to like it.

Hi unbound! Welcome to OpenCart!

Setting it up is quite easy

First be sure you download the latest 0.7.9 version of OpenCart. Not the 0.7.8 version

Second you will need a local webserver setup. The easiest way is to find an all-in-one package.
Xampp is a very popular one.
I prefer EasyWamp

Once you download one of those, install it. It will install the major components you need like
- Apache
- Mysql
- PHP5

After install, you should be able to find a site when you type
http://localhost
into the address bar. If you see the site, then you are half way there

You should see a link on that page for "phpmyadmin" somewhere. You will need to go here and create a database. Call it "opencartdb"
You should have a default user. On EasyWamp it is "root" with password of "root". Check the documentation for the user in xampp.

Now extract the contents of the opencart zip file to the folder that corresponds to your webserver's web folder:
If you use xampp it should be C:\xampp\htdocs\    (iirc)
if you use easywamp it should be C:\EasyWamp\www\

you can rename the top level "upload" folder to something like "oc"

Now you can goto your browser and type:
http://localhost/oc/index.php
It should take you to the OpenCart installer
Enter the following:
Database Host: localhost
Database User: root
Database Pass: root
Database Name: opencartdb

Follow the steps and you should be done.

From this point, all things that you want to access like a webpage would go into this www or htdocs folder

Thanks for the clear instruction. I may try this anytime soon and happened to read this tutorial.
Looks helpful and thanks for the effort

Jason