I bought that same programmer and it has worked great for me. I simply plugged it into my USB port and Windows asked me for a device driver. I pointed it to a folder containing the files that I had downloaded from the product page and they installed without a problem. My OS is Windows Vista. I am unfamiliar with Windows 7, so I don’t know it’s driver install procedure, but I would assume that it is similar?
Sorry you’re having problems with this product. It’s meant to be a very low-cost programmer, and although we’ve had good luck with it in older versions of Windows, we haven’t tested it with 7 or with many different laptops (which sometimes have odd port hardware). A more “official” product to try would be Atmel’s own USB programming pod: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSea … AVRISP2-ND