Richard G. Harper said:
In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions allow
language changes. All other versions can only change languages if you
purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start all
over
This is a widespread misconception. But, with great respect ... it's wrong.
Every edition of Vista - Basic, Home, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate -
contains the support necessary to input and display text in a wide variety
of languages. The language version of Vista has no bearing on the possible
languages which can be used in an application. Apps runing on Russian Vista
Basic can display and input Chinese data; apps running on Japanese Vista can
display and input French data. And so on, for most language combinations.
It is true that additonal MUIs can only be installed on Enterprise and
Ultimate editions of Vista. That's a different matter. The MUI controls what
language Windows uses to display its own resources - menus, dialogue boxes,
etc. It also sets the default locale for the system. It does not limit the
languages which applications can use to display data or accept input.
An application can easily elect to use an explicit locale apart from the
default OS locale. Take Microsoft Office, for example - you can install a
Japanese language version of Office onto an English Vista Home Basic
edition, and it will work fine - in Japanese. You can also configure the
Japanese Language version of Office to use, say, Russian text, when running
on an English copy of Vista, and that will work fine too.
What you *cannot* do, is change the display name of a Windows resource
string like, say, "Control Panel" or "Recent Items" to some other language.
For that, you need the MUI; and the MUI can only be installed on Enterprise
and Ultimate editions.
If an application does not set an explicit codepage, it will use whatever
the default OS locale is. This is when you get Chinese text for example
displayed as a row of square boxes, question marks, or the like. The
solution there is to configure an explicit default locale for non-Unicode
applications. This facility works exactly the same, on all editions of
Vista.
Admittedly, Microsoft themselves have generated a lot of this confusion, by
being perversely restrictive about distributing language resources - MUIs
for Ultimate only, for example. In a globalised world, you'd think it makes
sense for everyone to mix'n'match languages freely. Fortunately, Vista is
part of the way there: there's no obstacle to installing a Japanese IME on
Home Basic edition.
Regards,