Installing and Setting Up WordPress Locally

I am setting up Wordpress on localhost using Xampp on my PC. Yesterday I was asked for the database name, database user, password, and localhost from WordPress. It kept giving me errors in one place saying my wp-config.php was missing and then it would say I needed to find my wp-config-sample.php page. I have never set up the database wp_portfolio. Today, I found that I had a wp-config-sample.php file by itself in htdocs that might have been causing the problem and I took it out. I had my local host up and running and I get to the index window fine. When I click on allisongrayce.com the error below comes up "Error establishing a database connection”. I go to WordPress and it tell me:This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host's database server is down. Are you sure you have the correct username and password? Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname? Are you sure that the database server is running? I deleted all of my WordPress files and the allisongrayce.com files, reloaded them and the same “error” message as above appears again. I have my Apache and MYSQL both running. I can never get to my PhpMyAdmin location to set up the database. Is my PhpMyAdmin that I using to set up allisongrayce.com the same as my PhpMyAdmin on my Hostgator web server? I have a Hostgator account where I have a PhpMy Admin window that comes up in my c-panel. I created them a few weeks back under the section on Websites; How to make a WordPress blog; Getting started with WordPress; and then Preparing to manually install Wordpress. I called Hostgator to double check my passwords and the person on the phone said that they don't have them and if I didn't know them to set up a new user and password. I have spent 3 days getting the Xampp and localhost to work and now I am dead in the water again unable to set up my database with PhpMyAdmin. I have read numerous forums and am totally lost on what to do next besides skipping this section and it was the one I wanted to understand the most because I have websites on hold because I didn't know what I was doing. Thanks for any help.