Damnit... so what are you using now then?
Essentially my Top3000 was dead, it had programmed about a hand full of chips among dozens of failures before it simply refused to communicate over USB. I sent it to another AP member who had a confirmed good, working software setup and he couldn't get it to work either so we trashed it.
After the Top3000 I moved to an
EETools ChipMax 2, which is a really fantastic programmer, arguably the nicest programmer with the nicest software I've ever used.
Honestly, I got sick of wasting time with all the crappy Chinese programmers. Moving to the ChipMax2 was a breath of fresh air. Zero problems installing the software, because it's a legit professional grade product, everything is in English, from the software, to the official website, to the documentation, and it has real support, because it's a USA made product. It programs about twice as fast as my GQ did, has a much nicer socket, metal enclosure. Not to mention I had a literal pile of chips that my GQ4 and Top3000 refused to program and the ChipMax2 wrote to them like they were brand new.
However, I've since moved to an
Xeltec SuperPro, it's not as nice as the ChipMax2 but it has a much larger list of compatible chips, which I needed for some obscure stuff I was working with.
Neither of these are comparable price wise to the Top3000 as they both retail around $600 but if you wait for one to come up you can often find them used for around $350 (which is what I paid for each).
they're twice the price but well worth it IMO.