I have an esp8266 Huzzah on a breadboard with the FTDI cable to a powered USB hub and plugged in to the motherboard's ports, and have closed or removed all peripherals from Windows 10, including Bluetooth and all virtual drives.
I have used Putty and the Arduino IDE. It's difficult to follow a lot of these setup guides because everyone's got a different thing, but the best I can do with Putty except a blank screen is I get a little bit of gibberish on the command screen whenever I press the reset button but that's it. No input is possible.
Most advice I see is "Use Arduino IDE, it's easier," so on the Arduino IDE, I the best I get are communication errors, basically "warning: espcomm_sync failed," "error: espcomm_open failed" and "error: espcomm_upload_mem failed." Otherwise it's a whole slew of java errors and whatnot that I correct by reverting the parameters back to what they were.
I've tried older versions of Arduino IDE, made sure the current FTDI driver is installed, restarted a billion times, connected the 8266 to its own power source, done the thing with the Additional Boards Manager, nothing gets better, just worse. Can anyone help me out? Assistance would be greatly appreciated. I'll be happy to copy any needed info.