Supplemental Language Support

Does vista have an option to install additional languages? If so, how? Its
not as easy to install as it was when I had XP.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

You can only change the language of Vista if you have Vista Ultimate
or Enterprise.

With Ultimate, you can download the language packs for free.
Just open Windows Update, choose "view available updates",
and check the language pack you want.

Afterwards, from Control Panel (categories view), just choose
"Change display language" under "Clock, Language and Region".
Pick your language, log off, log on, and done.

If you have another version of Vista other than those two,
such as Windows Vista Home Premium,
you'll need to purchase a "full version" of Windows
Vista in your desired language and perform a "clean install" or
install it on a separate partition or drive (dual-boot).


--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"KC" <KC@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:F61EB647-70E5-441B-9B71-42F24AE40F19@microsoft.com...
Does vista have an option to install additional languages? If so, how? Its
not as easy to install as it was when I had XP.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Well, I still want to use english, but there are some things I have that
require me to see the text in another language so I don't see a bunch of odd
symbols. (ie a file or document as opposed to using Vista in a whole other
language) Would the process be the same?

"Carey Frisch [MVP]" wrote:

> You can only change the language of Vista if you have Vista Ultimate
> or Enterprise.
>
> With Ultimate, you can download the language packs for free.
> Just open Windows Update, choose "view available updates",
> and check the language pack you want.
>
> Afterwards, from Control Panel (categories view), just choose
> "Change display language" under "Clock, Language and Region".
> Pick your language, log off, log on, and done.
>
> If you have another version of Vista other than those two,
> such as Windows Vista Home Premium,
> you'll need to purchase a "full version" of Windows
> Vista in your desired language and perform a "clean install" or
> install it on a separate partition or drive (dual-boot).
>
>
> --
> Carey Frisch
> Microsoft MVP
> Windows Shell/User
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> "KC" <KC@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:F61EB647-70E5-441B-9B71-42F24AE40F19@microsoft.com...
> Does vista have an option to install additional languages? If so, how? Its
> not as easy to install as it was when I had XP.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
>
>

"KC" <KC@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote...
> Well, I still want to use english, but there are some things I have that
> require me to see the text in another language so I don't see a bunch of
> odd
> symbols. (ie a file or document as opposed to using Vista in a whole
> other
> language) Would the process be the same?

It depends.

Every edition of Vista has all the stuff required to display data in a wide
variety of languages and codepages. No additional files need to be
installed. However it's up to the application you're using, to take
advantage of this language support in the operating system.

If the application is written to use Unicode - no problem! You can display
English, Japanese, Hebrew and Russian text (for example) all side-by-side,
on the one page. Every version of Vista has full Unicode support, just like
XP.

If the application is written to request a specific codepage from the
operating system - if, for example, the app says "I have Chinese data, so
please display this data using codepage 936", then every version of Vista
has built-in support for most common codepages (about 30 or 40 different
one, I think). It doesn't matter whether you're running English Vista or
Chinese Vista - they both have codepage 936 support built-in; and they can
both display Chinese data correctly, as long as the application asks for the
right codepage.

If the application is written to use the default non-Unicode codepage of the
operating system, then the data must match the version of the OS. So for
example, if the application says to Windows "I have Chinese data, please
display this data with whatever your normal codepage is", the data will
display correctly on a Chinese version of Windows, but on an English version
of Windows the data will appear garbled.

In this last situation, you can work around thr problem by adjusting the
default codepage. Go to Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, and
then click on the Administrative tab. You'll see a box labelled "Language
for non-Unicode programs". You can use this to change this the underlying
system locale, so it matches the non-Unicode data you're trying to display.

In Vista, all codepage files are installed by default. As I recall in XP,
only some common codepages were installed by default; and if you wanted
extra ones (such as EBCDIC) you had to manually install them later on.
Normally, Vista should be easier to use for multilingual data - not harder!
(although the stuff about MUI packs *is* very confusing).

So I guess the questions are:
- what language is the data you want to display, on English version Vista?
- what application are you using to display the data?
(and the supplementary question: does it use Unicode?).

Hope this helps a bit,
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au