Tested on Windows 10. Probably works in 7 and 8. I wrote this after I went through all of it, so let me know if I forgot a step.
In this guide:
- VirtualBox (allows you to run a Linux operating system such as Ubuntu while you are running Windows)
- Ubuntu 16.04 64 (a user friendly Linux installation that will be supported for many years)
- LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP - all of the things that you will run your web application on)
- Composer (this just manages your PHP dependencies, such as Laravel)