First off, thanks for taking the time to help me with this. I bought a nano off of Amazon (new, stocked by Amazon), and it came in the mail yesterday. I go to hook it up to my PC to upload the blink example, and... nothing. I get:
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
Which from what I understand is the generic "hey, I'm not talking to arduino" message. First I checked to see if the right COM port was selected, then made sure that I selected the nano with the 386 chip (which is printed on the top). Then I suspected drivers, so I made sure I had the right ones from the companies website. In device manager COM4 shows up as alive and happy. I did some digging on the internet, and tried grounding the reset pin (25 to 26) to no avail. It appears the bootloader is on there, the LED blinks when I hit the reset button. Pressing reset before upload doesn't help. Tried another USB cable, no success. Next I tried the loopback test, and got a response. At this point I'm not sure what else to do. It seems there is communication between the PC and arduino, but it's not working out. The serial communication stuff is at the default values.
I should mention that I have an uno that I use on this PC and I've never had a problem with it. Any ideas?