[geeks] Change language in WinXP

Sheldon T. Hall shel at artell.net
Thu May 28 10:04:44 CDT 2009


Quoth Jonathan J. M. Katz ...

> I've been on-site in Montreal for six months :( my high 
> school French has been just enough to keep me sane.

I took Spanish in high school and college ... but I've spent a lot more time
in France than in any Spanish-speaking country.  If you want to learn
French, get the "French in Action" audio-visual series from Annenberg/CPB
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_in_action), and get a tutor to help you
with it.  French is pretty difficut for English speakers, IMHO.

> The other instructions presented are good
> for changing the keyboard layout, display of digits, and 
> getting some dialog
> boxes in French. But the "start" menu will still say "start" and not
> "demarrer" like in a true copy of French XP. The only way to 
> change it is to have an MUI-enabled version of Windows.

Ah.  A bit of Googling shows me that the "Multilingual Interface Pack" is an
OEM-only piece.  It also seems to be a bit difficult to update to SP3.

Well, what the hey.  I fixed her machine (French XP) and her friend's
machine (Portugese XP), so maybe she can limp along with an English version
of XP.  I don't have any French keyboards, anyway.  French-Canadian (QWERTY
+ accents) ones, yeah, but not real French (AZERTY) ones.

Thanks.

-Shel



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