Windows 8 Laravel installation problem

Feeling pretty silly, having been having trouble installing laravel every step of the way

I've gotten up to the bit where I type "vagrant up" in the command line and it is giving me an error I can't seem to rectify:

first it says: Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider... ==> default: Box 'base' could not be found. Attempting to find and install... default: Box Provider: virtualbox default: Box Version: >= 0 ==> default: Adding box 'base' (v0) for provider: virtualbox default: Downloading base default:

An error occured while downloading the remote file. The error message, if any, is reproduced below. Please fix this error and try again.

Couldn't open file /Users/artie1991/base

I don't know what to do?

here is what my default Homestead.yaml file looked like when I first had it installed (I noticed some of the file paths were different to the tutorial defaults):

ip: "192.168.10.10"
memory: 2048
cpus: 1

authorize: /Users/me/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

keys:
    - /Users/me/.ssh/id_rsa

folders:
    - map: /Users/me/Code
      to: /home/vagrant/Code

sites:
    - map: homestead.app
      to: /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public

variables:
    - key: APP_ENV
      value: local

and here is what I changed it to:

---
ip: "10.0.10.10"
memory: 2048
cpus: 1

authorize: /Users/artie1991/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

keys:
    - /Users/artie1991/.ssh/id_rsa

folders:
    - map: /Users/artie1991/Homestead/Projects
      to: /home/vagrant/Sites

sites:
    - map: laravel.dev
      to: /home/vagrant/Sites/laravel-basics/public

variables:
    - key: APP_ENV
      value: local

very very unsure on how to proceed, if anyone has any insight that would be much appreciated.

Other things that may be of use to know: when I initially tried to enter the command "vagrant up" it came up with this error that wasn't covered: "A vagrant environment or target machine is required to run this command. Run 'vagrant init' to create a new vagrant environment. Or, get an ID of a target machine from 'vagrant global-status' to run this command on. A final option is to change a directory with a Vagrantfile and to try again'"

so I then ran "vagrant init" which gave me: "A 'Vagrantfile' has been placed in your directory. You are now read to 'vagrant up' your first virtual environment! Please read the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on 'vagrantup.com' for more information on using vagrant"l

Should I try uninstall anything I have done and try doing this through xampp? I have found a different guide online, or is what error I have solvable?