Switching WinXp Home to WinXP Pro... (LONG)

First, let me start by saying I really appreciate this board. It's already proven to be a great help to a novice computer guy like myself.

OK, let me give everyone plenty of background as to what I'm doing and what my problem is.

OK, I just built my first computer after my old computer was killed by a virus. The computer I've built now works great, although it's not THE fastest in the world. I'm sure some day I'll build something fast. Anyways, I live in Germany and had to make due with what was available to me here in Germany. As I said before, everything worked great except for one major problem. My copy of WinXP is in German. Upon initial purchase, I was under the impression that it could simply be changed back to English. Upon installation, however, I found that this is not the case. Despite making all the appropriate settings to use this in English. I called Microsoft Germany and they have told me that I must bite the bullet and buy another disk from the US.

Now, for my problems.

1) Do I have to start from scratch and load Pro as a fresh load? Can it be an upgrade that will change the language to English?

2) Once I have XP Pro (ENGLISH) up and running, I can change the language to German, right?? According to all the MUI documentation I've read, this is possible! Reason I'm asking is because I speak English as my primary language, however, my g/f speaks German as her primary language. Is it possible to set it up so that her user account shows all in German and mine in English. If not, that's not a problem as she can read English.

Once again, thanks for reading the long thread. I know this is a rather unique question, and I say thanks in advance for the help you give me.

 

gn85 - it is an interesting question and one for which I don't have an ANSWER. But I do have a suggestion.

Given the amount of changes required for English home to English pro and the very real chance that an upgrade would leave some language-specific files still set for a German version, I'd strongly suggest a clean install of XP-pro. I think you'll save yourself grief over the long run. Not even sure the other (English Pro over German Home) would work at all.

Once you have Pro loaded, adding on the MUI (Windows Multilingual User Interface) will allow exactly what you want for an English and a German user. There will be rare occasions when she gets English rather than German (some help center search results for instance) but not often.

I do have to wonder why the MUI won't load/run on XP-home but from some reading, it doesn't seem to.

 

XP Home is missing a bunch of stuff! (Home is making me crazy on the network at the church.) I've been keeping a list of the differences, if anyone is interested, I'll post it on a new thread.

I agree with Newt- you need a clean install.

Johanna

 

Thanks for the advice,

A new install it is. I can see your point about having problems with crossing the two and a clean sweep may be my best bet. I'm glad to hear that two users can use two different languages. That is somewhat the way I have it set up now. Her side reads the time/date and keyboard in German, temp/weather, etc. while my side reads English, American time, date, etc.

I ordered the XP Pro so it should be on its way.

One more question. What's the minimum requirements to run Pro? Home runs just fine on this computer. CPU is a little slow, but 512mg memory and 80 gig HDD, I don't think I'll have a prob there.

Thanks again.

 

As PeteC said, Pro will run. But if you had speed issues you might want to consider bumping the memory from .5Gb to 1Gb.

And when you get things installed, check Black Viper's web site for an excellent section on what things you can stop or remove to speed up the OS without taking away anything you want/need.

 

Thanks for the advice and the website. I have some time this weekend, so I'll be doing some browsing to see what I can shut off on XP. So far, I'm really happy with it.

Thanks again for all the information. Great board.

I will put up an update when I get the new disk and install everything. Thanks.