Winamp will launch itself right after it's finished installing, and you'll be presented with something that looks quite familiar. There's the main Winamp window which has the regular play control buttons such as Play/Pause, Stop, Next/Previous Track, shuffle and repeat, there's the Playlist window which lists all the files in your list of MP3 files to be played, there's a graphical equalizer for you audio buffs and there's a mini-browser which is basically just a built-in web browser--pretty useless if you ask me. So, this is what I would do right after I finish installing Winamp. First, press the Play button and you'll hear a sample MP3 file being played that goes something to the tune of this: "Winamp, it really whips the llama's ass!" If you hear it correctly, then jump up and down in joy (no, don't actually do it, it's a joke)! Then, close down the mini-browser, and the graphical equalizer (Winamp also has the "X" button to close down the "sub-windows," you just have to look harder to find them through all the flash, and make sure you don't click the close button on the main Winamp window because that'll close down Winamp itself).

One of the coolest features of Winamp is that it can actually hover above everything else, so you get the feeling of an actual audio player slapped on top of everything. This is called the "windowshade" mode. To get to the windowshade mode, simply double click on any of Winamp's windows titlebars (yes, you can also double-click on the main Winamp title bar). Cool, eh? Then, to make Winamp stay on top of everything else, right-click on any part of the Winamp window where there's no button, go down to Options, then click on "Always on Top." To complete the effect, first arrange the Winamp windows like this:

and then click and drag both of them to the top of the screen like this:

so when you place them in windowshade mode, you get this:

Pretty nifty, eh? There are tons of more features that you can fiddle around with in Winamp. I could write an entire multi-page computing guide just on Winamp, so I'm not going to even try to explain any of them in this guide. I'll tell you that if you right click on an open area of Winamp, go down to Options, and then click on Preferences, it will bring up the control panel for Winamp. Feel free to fiddle around with settings in there and check back to OnePC.NET to see if I've written my guide to Winamp (but, I'm not making any promises).

On to: Introducing the Searcher