EasyPhp issue

I am trying to learn php and using easyphp for now. I have a online friend who has been helping me. He stated that wordpress (where I am going eventually) does not like the port 8888 that comes standard in the Apache. He instructed me to change it to 80 which I did, and through that night I was able to finish about 3 chapters of lessons before going to bed.
The next morning I woke up and my computer had turned itself off, either due to an update or some other cause, I do not know for sure. The point being that it screwed up my easyphp stuff and so I had to uninstall it, and re-install it which failed. So I deleted it and reinstalled it. I changed it to 80 again in the 2 places, listen and server name, but it rejects it saying port 80 is being used by""system.
I changed it to 88 instead, but every scrpit I run comes up with a 404 error and it gives as its looking address :80 not :88
I hope this makes sense to someone out there, because I really need to keep on in my lessons but nothing is working and my buddy is out of ideas.:cry