Hey.
I need to use PD for a college assignment and I can't for the life of me install it.
The book I have says to download it and you have an installer or something but it seems that's for the extended version, however it also says not to use the extended version.

When I download it I just get a load of folders. I tried installing cygwin like in the instructions but the commands that it gives doesn't work.

Any help would be sweet! I'm on Windows by the way

You might have downloaded the source code, not the Windows binary. You only need cygwin if you intend on compiling it. The Windows binary is here:

http://puredata.info/downloads/pure-data