There are three things you must do if you want to be able to write, process and view/print TeX files on your personal computer. You need an editor, an ascii editor (not MS Word or WordPerfect or Notepad which embed control characters like carriage returns in documents). Without a doubt, the best TeX editor is WinEdt. It's shareware so, if you like it, it will cost you eventually (the student rate is US$30, a steal). Any DOS editor will work, but WinEdt is SO MUCH BETTER than anything else.

Next, having written your TeX file, you will want to process it, that is, run it through LaTeX. For this, I highly recommend MikTeX which is free. It instals and configures itself automatically, provides for automatic updates at the click of a button, comes with viewers, conversion utilities to produce postscript and pdf files and assumes that your editor is WinEdt.

Good luck with your instalation. If you have any problems, please contact me.