Installing Craft on Xampp
It might be easier for you to set up a local domain and access it via my-site.dev rather than localhost/public/admin.

Using xampp this is a bit of a manual process. You'll need to go into:
xampp/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and the following 

## my site name Site  
&lt;VirtualHost *:80&gt; 
    DocumentRoot "D:/xampp/htdocs/my-site"
    ServerName my-site.dev
    ServerAlias www.my-site.dev
    &lt;Directory "d:/xampp/htdocs/my-site"&gt;
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    &lt;/Directory&gt;
&lt;/VirtualHost&gt;


The open your text editor with administrator rights and go to: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add the following:

127.0.0.1 my-site.dev


For an easier process to set this up use Ampps instead the gui is simpler and everything is automated. Though you may still need to open your hosts file with your text editor if you haven't set up ampps to run with administrator privileges.

I used to use xampps, but now much prefer ampps on windows.