Downloading

Hi, I am making a homepage, and I was wondering how to make it so that 
people can download a certain file from my page.  I tried going
<A HREF="file://www.cnw.com/~castoff/file.exe>file.exe</A>
but that didn't work to download.  It thought that my account was an ftp 
site or something.
THen I tried saying <A HREF="www.cnw.com/~castoff/file.exe">file.exe</A> 
but then, it just scrolled a bunch of junk all over the screen.
	I want to make it so that when you click on the link it asks you 
if you want to download the file or save to disk or whatever.  I wonder 
if I need to give the file certain permissions with the chmod command...
I tried a bunch of chmod commands, but it still didn't work.  Please help 
me make this work.
Thanks.

-castoff