Naoko Hamamoto's Weblog
Friday February 27, 2009
What's the Issue? Cannot Change the UI Language on my Windows XP?
I do a lot of testing under various configurations, and one of the testings that I had to perform today required Japanese Windows XP environment.
I decided to use my own Windows laptop, which has Windows XP in English installed.
I know that Windows allows you to change the language in which the UI components are displayed (and I have done it before at work), so I was looking for a way to do that. Looks like you can do it by changing the Language used in menus and dialogs option. This article explains the steps very well.
So I tried to do the same on my system, BUT there is no such option on my system. I logged out and logged back in, rebooted the system, etc. No luck. What the heck?
It turns out that this feature is only available on Windows XP Professional Edition. The version that I have is Windows XP Home Edition, so this feature is disabled. Oh boy, no wonder I could not get it to work at home, but it was working fine elsewhere. Just FYI, you can find out the version of your OS by running the winmsd command at the command-line prompt. You will see something like the following with a lot of information about your system.
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
