I'm in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. I'm trying to learn AVR Programming by starting here: http://hackaday.com/2010/10/23/avr-programming-introduction/
I'm sure you'd realize that for a newbie, there's a sudden rush of new terminology that I don't understand. I need to take one step at a time. I've decided to follow this tutorial step by step. For example, I own a STK600 but after reading the instruction manual several times, I still don't know enough to do ISP from it.
I built myself a DAPA cable. Problem is, none of my computers has a parallel port. I installed a 3rd party parallel port card (cheap Chinese rubbish) into a PCI slot on my desktop, but it turns out the driver is unsigned and probably doesn't work on Windows 7 anyway.
In order to follow this tutorial, I need a computer with a motherboard-mounted parallel port that will run avrdude and reliably program an AVR through it. Any ideas what kind of computer/operating system would give me the most compatibility? I guess I could go through ebay to buy an old computer, or find someone locally.