Changing the user interface language in WinXP

O

Oooska

Gawd
Joined
Jan 1, 2006
Messages
861
I've got a computer here that was from Japan. The user wanted it formatted with a clean installation of Windows. That wasn't too big of a deal. I've got everything installed and up and running okay. Keyboards back in Japanese, the East-Asian language pack is installed, but I can not, for the life of me, figure out how to get the UI back into Japanese. I've been reading Microsoft's articles, but none are entirely clear on what I need to do to go about doing this. I keep seeing references to muisetup.exe. It was not installed by the system (though a search of the disk shows muisetup.ex_, so I'd presume theres a way to get it installed on the system from the Windows disk), but I can't seem to figure out how. I also found a ~10MB setup file that appeared to be what I need, but it says I need to have SP2 installed when I run it (only problem is, I do have SP2, and all the latest updates).

Does anyone have any experience with this and have any suggestions?
 
If I remember correctly I thought the UI language was based on the version of windows. If it were a Japanese copy you would get the Japanese UI. But I could be wrong. If you want to use that file all you have to do is type the following at a command promt to extract it.

expand muisetup.ex_ muisetup.exe

That will expand the file and make it useable. Hope this helps.
 
All I have heard is that only window's MUI versions support changing the UI language.
 
Thanks for the tip. I did expand it, but it refuses to run on the platform. . . indicating that driizt is right (why would they have included it on the Windows XP disk? God only knows.)

If there's one thing that Microsoft has done to make my life a living hell at work, its making 50,000,000 different versions of Windows XP. I work for the IT department. in my university. Students never think to bring to their OS disks to school with them, and I can't really blame them. For your average Joe's computer, this isn't a problem, since we have copies of most major versions of Windows XP (all 4 or 5 of them), but I'll be damned if I don't see a system once a week that needs some foreign copy of Windows or something to that effect. I know Vista is *suppose* to fix this issue, but I have to admit, I'm not holding my breath. . .

In any case, thanks for the help guys.
 
I used to work at a helpdesk for a university and we stopped supporting other languages other than english for OS's. But that was the universities call. Good luck to you, sorry it didn't work.
 
There's a separate MUI pack that MS offers.

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/MUIFaq.mspx

I tinkered with it back when I first got XP and had access to a MSDN account. It was kinda cute, it changed the whole interface and all of the default install Windows apps to the respective language, and even worked on the profile level, so different users on one PC could have different language interfaces. The only problem is it didn't really change the install to that country's version. You don't end up with a foreign copy of Windows, you have a US copy that just has a different interface. It won't be file-to-file compatible with a foreign copy of Windows.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top