I have a gamestop PS3 controller. This one to be exact. The controller works fine on my windows 7 computer. I plugged it up and windows recognized it. Anyways, I bought a gamestop branded wired xbox 360 controller and even after installing the drivers and reading a bunch of forums I couldn't figure it out. I went back to Gamestop returned it and bought the Afterglow 360 wired controller after reading that that one should definitely work and I still can't get it to work.
Playstation game controllers can be connected to Windows PCs directly as they use USB connectors which you can use for that purpose.
A system like Windows 7 will recognize the controller and install the necessary drivers automatically but you still need to install additional drivers first before it is recognized in most games and programs.
The driver package of choice for many is MotioninJoy which you can download here. While it is highly popular, it is displaying ads in its interface which requires an Internet connection.
There are other solutions available that you can try as well to get the controller to be recognized properly on the system and by games running on it.
Note: Blocking the port or killing the process once the controller has been connected properly to the system seems to have no ill-effect on the functionality.
Setup
While the controller will work fine in games, you may want to download a program called Better DS3. It provides you with configuration options in a clean and ad-free environment.
Now it is time to test the controller in games you want to play and make adjustments to the profile in case something is not working correctly.
The PSCX2 profile worked best for me. It mapped the buttons correctly to the controller in games I tried so that I was able to use X for selections for instance.
Have you connected a game controller to your PC before? If so, how was your experience?