I bought a knockoff JDM PIC16F84A programmer a while back, it was dirt cheap on ebay... and I think I know why. I haven't been able to get this thing to work across 4 operating systems,two computers and 5 different pieces of software... I think I've narrowed it down to the device just not working... I was fortunate enough to fine ONE website on the whole interweb thing that sold a similar device... very very similar... they have a picture up on their side and it looks almost identical, but it's got a LED on it unlike mine (so I don't know if it's working anyway!). Well they ALSO have a parts list, it shows a 100uf 10v cap, while the one on mine is a 10uf 12v cap... it looks like mine may not be getting enough power from the cap (it uses two diodes to take alternating pulses from the serial port and charge the cap from that, as far as I can tell), so I may be doing a little modifying. I spent about an hour and a half today tracing the circuit and drawing is up in EagleCAD so I can get a good look at how everything fits.