I've been using Limor's USBTinyISP programmer with Win2k OS. That worked fine. Now my new laptop has Windows 7 and the driver for the TinyISP does not load due to the driver not being signed$$$.
I tried the ArduinoISP but I am getting errors writing EEPROM. I use command line avrdude to write eeprom and fuses. The data is apparently written to eeprom and then read back out and checked agianst the original. This check fails. Have not looked into this any further.
What ISP will work with Win7 and Arduino (I add to boards.txt to program with ISP thru Arduino) and avrdude and target boards from 3 to 5volts?
I've read that if you press F8 while booting Win7 that you can use unsigned drivers. I did this and the only thing that happened was that no USB device worked at all.
OK - some really great ideas! I tried the one that apogee recommended. I turned off driver signing requirements. Used gpedit.msc on Win 7 64 professional to edit the signing requirements. As a side note - my other win 7 Home Premium laptop does not have this tool.
Now the driver installs seemingly fine. But now arduino and avrdude can't find it. The error is:
Could not find USBtiny device (0x1781/0xc9f)
Later I'll research this (google)and see if there is anything to do.