cant connect

ok, i know this isnt really looked well upon, and it is kinda outrageous to come here for help. i was handed this knock off arduino nano board a few days ago by a buddy of mine. as a long time uno owner i thought it would be plug and play as anything with regular arduinos, but i was of course wrong. i couldent get it to be recognized or anything, no matter what i did.

after a while of pondering i saw that instead of a standard issue FTDI chip there was something else there, a CH3406. it wouldent even recognize asanything more than a "usb2.0-serial" on some obscure port i cant get the arduino program to send stuff to.

as i said, it is frowned upon by even me to do knockoffs, but as this is for a school project and i kinda need it i humbly come here for help, as you guys are the most proficient at this i could come up with at the moment.

this place http://www.instructables.com/answers/AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaahh-WHY-WHY-WHY-Cant-my-computer-se/
said that i could set it to a UNO board and go Ctrl + Shift + U, but that didnt work. i think i'm missing something here.
it's saying
avrdude.exe: usbdev_open(): did not find any USB device "usb"

hmmm, my scrubbishness doesent help a bit

if anyone finds this post offensive on the arduino forums btw i am willing to say sorry to every one, i hope you dont get too mad at me.

Can you select a COM port in the Arduino IDE when you plug the arduino nano?