You haven't really given us enough details to debug your problem...
Which tutorial are you using?
What chip are you trying to program?
What is the avrdude command that you are using (exactly)? Are you using the WINAVR version of avrdude or the arduino installed avrdude? (which version?)
"Timeout" occurs how far into the transfer? What sort of debug info do you get from avrdude when you give it -v -v -v -v on its command line?