Settings to send an email from localhost for PHP code in Windows Vista

I am using PHP 5 and Apache to do programming. My code can correctly send emails on the server, but on my own development machine I cannot send emails. There is clearly nothing wrong with my code, so I guess the problem is with my settings.

I have turned off IIS so that I can assign port 80 to my Apache instance. I did not install PHP, Apache, MySQL using WAMP or XAMPP, but I installed each component individually.

I have already tried assigning SMTP to localhost in php.ini and the port number, etc.

I am running on Windows Vista. I am using a router at home, and I tend to assign a fixed IP address, 192.168.0.9 to my development machine.

I used PHPMailer where I state a specific from address and to address and once again I insist that the code works on my live server.

It is just not working on my development machine.

Vista does not come with an SMTP server like Windows XP did.

I ran into a similar issue when I switched my development environment to Vista. So, you have to install an SMTP server.

There are many to choose from, but I chose Free SMTP Server to handle development needs.