Some Basic Bilingual Win95 IssuesQ: I've just arrived in Japan, and now must go shopping for a computer. Since I've been studying the language, I'd like to have Japanese typing and printing capability, but I'll be using English at least 95% of the time. I know these are probably dumb questions, but: (1) Will English Windows 95 and its applications even run on a Japanese computer? (2) If so, and if I bought a computer with Japanese Win95 already installed, can I also install English Win95? (3) Or, if not, would I be able to run my English applications on Japanese Win95? A: There's no such thing as a dumb question (only dumb answers). We often get variations of these questions, so here's a succinct overview of the topic that points to lengthier answers in previous issues of Computing Japan (which you can find in the Back Issues section of our website, http://www.computingjapan.com). To address your first question: Yes, if the computer you're considering is capable of running Japanese Windows 95, then it's capable of running English Windows 95. A possible problem you might encounter would be if one of the system's peripherals is a nonstandard "in-Japan-only" device. In that case, the English Win95 installation's "plug-and-play" might not recognize it, and obtaining a workable English-language device driver could prove to be difficult if not impossible. So, stick with a name brand that uses "industry standard" parts. It's easy to install English Win95 over the Japanese version of the same. (Hint: Using the /is switch when running setup prevents scandisk from choking on double-byte file names.). But if you want to retain Japanese capability, that's not an option, which leads to your second question. Lots of users have installed both English and Japanese (not to mention Spanish, French, etc.) versions of Win95 on a single computer. Unfortunately, the process isn't as simple as it should be. Win95 keeps some essential version-specific files in the root directory of drive C:, so even if you install your second version of Win95 in a separate directory, or on a different disk, the installation process will overwrite those files. And if you first copy these root files to another directory, you need some means of returning them to the root directory when switching between languages. In the two years since Windows 95 was released, Computing Japan has published three solutions to the problem of installing two or more versions of Win95. Of these, the best and easiest (though most expensive, at about ¥12,000) is a "pre-operating system" software package called System Commander. For more about System Commander, see the June 1996 and October 1996 Help Desks. (For the other options, see also Dec. 1995's "Ensuring Peaceful Coexistence" and the August 1996 Help Desk.) If you want or need to try it (such as to save space on a small hard disk), running your English-language applications on Japanese Windows 95 is a viable solution. All Win95 versions of English applications should run on Japanese Windows 95 without problem (aside from the occasional mis-sized system font in message boxes). The same, however, can't be said for many older Windows 3.1 and DOS applications. The stumbling block with this solution, of course, is that while your application's menus and help files will be in English, the Windows menus and help files will be in Japanese. (And, in some applications, the menus may be a mixture of English and Japanese.) Useful for studying the language, perhaps, but hardly conducive to productivity unless your kanji-reading ability is already at a high level. It is possible, though, for those who want to spend the time, to manually and individually change Win95's kanji Start menu entries to English. See the October 1996 Help Desk for details. If you do only 5% of your computing in Japanese, though, your best bet might be to simply use Japanese in your English-language Win95 and applications. There are several (shareware and commercial) programs that will let you do this, including Pacific Software Publishing's KanjiKit 97. (See this month's Product Profiles, page 43.) For a brief discussion of the earlier version of the program, see "KanjiKit: Doing Japanese in English Windows 95" in the August 1996 issue. This solution can be cumbersome if you need to do a lot of Japanese text entry, and the onscreen display/ printout of kanji is limited (just two included fonts), but it's probably the quickest and easiest solution for occasional Japanese display and input. |
