ANOTHER "Error establishing a database connection"

[do publish your personal information]

I’ve never successfully used WordPress – tried in the past, and ran into so many of this kind of error, I quit. Trying again…….

I figure there have to be a ton of topics that resolve this but I’ve been looking around for just over 3 hours now, and I’m not seeing anything that fixes my problem.

Local install on PC running Windows 10.

I got the wamp server running after chasing around for an hour to get apache to work.

I got into the mysql piece and created:
database – “xyz”
user – “xyz”
password – “xyz”
host – “localhost”

which SEEMS to simple it would be IMPOSSIBLE to screw up… I can create a TABLE and a COLUMN and run SQL to insert records. So the database is apparently up and working………

Go back to localhost/wordpress and it wants me to provide the database, user, password, and host – simple enough and hard to screw up… So, I do. All lower case, just like above (I even did a snip to put the picture in here, but can’t see how)…

And, I get the “Error establishing a database connection” and no wp-config file…….. So, I take the SAMPLE wp-config and change the user, password, database info in there and create my OWN wp-config:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘xyz’);
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘xyz’);
/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘xyz’);
/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

Touched NOTHING else in the entire file.

Back to Firefox. Entered localhost/wordpress and got the SAME error.

WHAT do I need to do to get this product INSTALLED correctly?