noob can't install python modules/scripts

[lostguru]

hi, I'm not that new to programming (java) but I'm a pathetic newbie when it comes to python. I just started learning today and I'm trying to install third-party modules/scripts (I don't know the difference at the moment) so that they'll work in python; namely, easy_install/pip/distribute and beautifulsoup4

python version is 2.7.3; platform is windows 7, 64-bit

when I first installed python, I couldn't get it to run from the command line just by typing "python"; installing activepython (also 64-bit) seemed to have solved the problem (I later added C:\Python27 and C:\Python27\Scripts to the %PATH% environmental variable, not sure if this changed anything however)

the only problem now is that I can't install any modules for python (that or they're installed and not working); I'm aware that my 64-bit installation needs the respective 64-bit versions of all of the modules I want installed, so I made sure to download those; but running/installing all of those has yielded no reaction

using easy_install as an example, I downloaded the .py script the website told me to use for 64-bit installations, and ran it; as far as I know nothing happened (was I supposed to put it in a specific folder first before running it?) and trying to type "easy_install" into python gives me this:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in <module>
    easy_install
NameError: name 'easy_install' is not defined

trying to type "easy_install BeautifulSoup4" gives me this:
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I'm at a loss as to why none of this works; did I not set up Python correctly? or was there some step I missed/ignored? any help or input would be much appreciated at this stage