Downloading and Installing Skype

To download Skype, visit www.skype.com in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and click on the Download menu item at the top of the home page. This displays the Download Skype page. Click on the link for the Windows platform, which takes you to the download page specifically for Skype for Windows. Next, click on the Get it now button, which displays a page with helpful step-by-step instructions. Click on the Download button, which will then display the popup window shown in the following figure. This popup gives you three ways to proceed:
Run, Save, or Cancel. The third option, Cancel, is fairly obvious in that it cancels the download process. Run and Save can both be used to run the Skype setup program, but they do so in different ways, which I explain in the following sections.
Before downloading and installing the Skype softphone, you might want to familiarize yourself with the user interface—the look and feel of the Skype softphone. That way, when you run Skype, you will already know how to do some basic things with it. Check out the screenshots of the Skype softphone at www.skype.com/download/screenshots.html. Also, look at the online user guides for Skype at www.skype.com/help/guides.