You also need to have a USB power draw thing (I don't remember the technical name but it plugs into the USB port and the stick plugs into that) for testing and adjusting voltage because you can end up with way to much power even at 500MHz if you have too much amp wise if you adjust too much on it.  After I finish each stick I just move the next stick onto it.  So you only need 1 of them and they are less than $20 on Amazon.

I think you are going to continue to have problems on a Windows based machine.  Each stick upon receiving them I did run myself on my personal desktop (at the time a AMD 3950x on a Gigabyte Aorus MB, but I used a USB hub that could provide 2.5A so even at 500MHz it would get angry at points).  The PI is a cheap very easy to setup solution and you can just set the sticks up with some kind of cooling solution and forget about them really.  I monitor everything through the default miner.php included in cgminer.