[seniorcit]

Hello
New member so hope I do not break any rules. I can find no suitable topic to pose my question in, which is rather an odd problem, having looked through the general types of queries posted. So possibly somebody can advise me if there is a topic which covers unusal problems which are difficult to caterogise.
Seniorcit

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Seniorcit

Well, we could better tell you where to post if we knew what your problem was. I assume it has to do with your Packard Bell netbook, but I don't know whether to direct you to the Operating System forum, or the hardware forum. Please give us a description of your problem and we'll be happy to help you.

[sari]

Seniorcit

Well, we could better tell you where to post if we knew what your problem was. I assume it has to do with your Packard Bell netbook, but I don't know whether to direct you to the Operating System forum, or the hardware forum. Please give us a description of your problem and we'll be happy to help you.

[seniorcit]

Hello
problem briefly is Daughter gave mother a Packard Bell netbook type dot zg5, unfortunately Daughter lives in Holland and when she purchased the unit, she loaded the operating system in Dutch (she had a choice of Dutch or English). I would like to know whether it is possible to revert the unit to a 'reboot' state? where it is possible to change O/S to English. It would appear impossible to obtain english users guide which would possibly guide me through the recovery method. Odd problem I am sure.
seniorcit

[dsenette]

what operating system is this?

[seniorcit]

Bonjour Napoleon
O/S is Windows XP.
seniorcit

[dsenette]

gah, so it's old.

ok, if you can read dutch enough to do this, go into control panel, and look for regional and language settings (the icon looks like a little globe, there may be more than one little globe though). if this is XP that was originally english, but was transformed into dutch with the microsoft MUI kit, there should be 3 tabs instead of just 2.

if that's the case, the 2nd tab is where you'll get the most things back into english (there are drop downs on that tab, at least one of them should have the word "english" in it) change everything you can find on that tab and the third tab to english, and then press ok and apply and then it will force you to restart.

[seniorcit]

Hi Napoleon
sorry to say your advice did not work, went through settings looking at another XP O/S to find settings, (have no Dutch). Contacted Daughter in Holland as to how she received the netbook. Appears in the Benelux countries when you purchase a computer you often have the choice at initial startup to select between English or Netherlands. I think that this implies that you cannot alter the O/S language without installing XP from scratch. Would appreciate your thoughts on this. Again thankyou for your kind help.
seniorcit

[dsenette]

it's probably a somewhat accurate statement. there are a couple of ways to get XP in a different language, one is with a native language install, the other is with an after the fact MUI install.

the native language install just installs the language you choose so you don't have another language to switch to because they were never installed. the MUI install adds language transformations to a base language install (usually english) so you can uninstall (or just turn off) the MUI stuff and it reverts back to the base language


looks like your was a native language. so you'd have to start over to get back to a different language. the netbook might have a recovery partition or something that you could use to revert the thing back to factory defaults.

[seniorcit]

Napoleon
Many thanks for your assistance.