I'll be honest here. I'm very much a console gaming peasant and no nothing baout PC gaming. I only play RTS on it and even then a very limited list of games.

iv'e found a mod for medieval 2 total war called the third age. it asks me to do a ton of stuff i dont know how to do, any help would be amazing.

right, first I have to patch  medieval 2 and kingdoms. I download the patch and click on it, and it says it can't open it since it doesn't know what programe to open it with. How do I tell it that?

and then I have to get the mod itself.  how do I mod a game?

http://www.moddb.com/mods/third-age-total-war/page/2#comments for reference this is the mod and im running on vista

is it zipped? .zip
then extract it with winzip

how do I extract with winzip?

uhm... da button with extract beneath it...

if you have Windows Vista or 7, just rightclick it and click on "Extract All." If you have WinXP, I can't remember if you can do that, but I think you can (its waay easier than using winzip in any case)  after that, you should see a file or folder that has the name as the .zip file did. find the file that ends in .exe and doubleclick it. (If you don't see one of those, look for one that ends in .msi and do the same) It should give you instructions on where to go from there. (once you extract the zipped file, its pretty much the same as installing any other software)

Hey woopah,
I guess you can consider me the 'resident mod enthusiast' around here since I am one of the few who promotes and plays mods more than commercial games.

Please let me know if you are still having trouble, it sounds like it was zipped and you need to extract it and then install it. I can give you step by step instructions if you need so just let me know.
You can send me a pm too if you want :)

You are already going to a great site (moddb.com) but don't be scared to try all the thousands of other amazing mods!