Need Help: insert tab(8 characters) for every tabstroke

[amit mehta <gmate.amit@gmail.com>]

I'm a complete n00b and hence please don't shower your wrath upon me.
I'm finding it little difficult to use TABS in my 'C' programs. I've been a vim
user till last week and have slowly started to migrate towards mighty emacs.
In vim, I usually indent my code with tabs, where each tab stroke replaces the
cursor by 8 columns, but in an emacs buffer, a tab stroke doesn't work this
way by default. I did some text search and based on that, have added the
following line under $HOME/.emacs:

(setq indent-tabs-mode t)

but this doesn't work(i mean, hitting the TAB key on my keyboard doesn't
move forward the cursor to 8 columns to the right), so every time i need a TAB,
I've to use C-q <tab>. this is overkill.

Then I tried putting just this entry in $HOME/.emacs, but this too doesn't work
(setq default-tab-width 8);


Please help.

-amit