I have a folder called crm in htdocs which contains a fresh laravel 5.1 project and i am trying to acess it via http://localhost/crm/ but it just brings the index of page co
You need to point Laravel to public directory to make it work. For example, if you've installed Laravel in C:/xampp/htdocs/ directory, you need to use these settings:
DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/public"
Do not edit .htacces inside public folder. Try to change settings and load Laravel website by going to localhost first.
When you've edited Apache config file, you should restart web server.