Installing The Skin Thing should be extreemly easy if you have the right equipment. You'll need:

• WinZip
  Can be found somewhere around http://www.winzip.com/.

• Counter-Strike (which needs Half-Life)
  If you don't know what this is, why are you here in the first place? Head to http://www.counter-strike.net/ now!

• A large number of Skins for Counter-Strike
  Found all over the web.

Download TheSkinThing.zip and unzip the contents to a folder of your choice (eg: C:\Program Files\TheSkinThing). There should be two files: TheSkinThing.exe and ReadMe.txt.

(Optional) Create a shortcut to TheSkinThing.exe file on your Desktop and/or Start Menu.

Run TheSkinThing.exe and then click on the Configure button. Enter in the following:

• Skins Folder:
  This is the folder where you store all of your Counter-Strike skins. See the section below on how your Skins Folder should be organised.

• Counter-Strike Folder:
  The folder where Counter-Strike is installed. The default is C:\Sierra\Half-Life\cstrike and should be OK unless you installed Half-Life / Counter-Strike somewhere different.

• (Optional) Half-Life Executable Command Line:
  Enter the command line you would like The Skin Thing to use to start up Half-Life / Counter-Strike. Again, the default should be OK unless you installed Half-Life or Counter-Strike somewhere different or you just wanna add something interesting to the command line like -nofragswhilecamping.

• (Optional) Model Viewer Command Line:
  Here you can enter the command line that The Skin Thing should use to preview your .mdl files. I personally use Half-Life Model Viewer.

The Skin Thing expects to find all of your skins in a simple folder structure where each folder contains all the files belonging to a single skin.

For an example setting Skins Folder to C:\My Documents\My Skins and 'Sub-Folders' off (ie the default), this is how your skins folder should look:

And this is how those skins would look in The Skin Thing:

If you turn the 'Sub-Folders' option on then your skins folder should look something like this:

And The Skin Thing will be able to show your skins to you like this:

Sometimes when you download a skin it will have some folders with in it. The Skin Thing likes to find all of the files that make up the skin in the same folder. When putting these skins into your skins folder for The Skin Thing, make sure that you move all of the files included into the one folder.