Dahua HBD3200 unbricking - putty jumble

I checked the prolific site and they mentioned windowsupdate will auto download the driver. That appears to be what the new W7 build did as when checking the device properties I see it's the 3.8.3.0 driver that prolific has listed on their site.

Maybe I'm getting myself confused now with the cable terms. The cable I have now throws in the RS232 in the name, but says it's a TTL cable (Armorview PL2303HX USB To TTL To UART RS232 COM Cable). The majority of the cables I see with the PL2303HX name say USB To RS232 TTL.
Is there a difference with cables that mention RS232 or am I just getting myself mixed up?
 
Is there a difference with cables that mention RS232
I don't think there is - in that I don't think it refers to the 'classic' RS-232 bipolar signal levels of +- 3v to 15v
I suspect it's just loose terminology, as far as I know, the PL2303HX supports 'TTL' signal levels only.
Flexible signal level requirement on the RS-232 serial port side also allows the PL-2303HX to connect directly to 3.3V ~ 1.8V devices.
 
I do have a laptop with ubuntu on it. Could try and see if there is any difference. Quite rusty on my Linux though.
 
To cover one more base, I ordered that adapter you mentioned. Coming from across the pond so it may take a bit to get here but if my Linux trial doesn't show anything different this will allow another angle to be tried.