Ok. I was getting over a severe case of bronchitis/ mild case of walking pneumonia, and my friend was occupied with family matters and had no time to babysit me. When I heard her complain that her brother foisted off booking the flight of visiting relatives onto her, because his computer was too slow to do the online reservations, I though: "why not?"
Getting a "junk" PC was the easy part. The local HARD OFF used tech store had some for 6kY (appx 73CA$) but the 40gb hard drive and 256M of ram looked anemic. A night of browsing on Yahoo auctions found a nice 2.4ghz celeron Fuijitsu with no hard drive, cdrom only 512Mb ram for 1000 Y. (12.20CA$) delivery and COD brought that to 2300Y (28 CA$) Thank You and Kudos to SUPERJUNKPC who sells on Yahoo.co.jp auctions. A google search turns up that these were common office machines in JP 6 years ago, and are a plague on the land.
The hard drive, a 200GB western digital IDE came in at 1,500Y delivered. Add a keyboard used, from hard-off for 100Y (and about 1200Y worth of other stuff including blank CDs, and misc. not used) and we are ready to go. Best of all, the beast had the all-important (if you care about such things) Windows XP Pro COA / License sticker on it, meaning that it is "allowed" to have a copy of Windows on it.
.. Of which I do not have.
Time to get a bit grey market. The way I see it, software piracy is a matter of intent. Since I intend to stick XP on a machine licensed for it, no harm no foul. You think differently? You are either an ex- USA and Canadian lawyer, who has practiced copyright law in Japan, and is fully versed on current case -law, and has a lot of 2k$/hour time on your hands, or you are an ignorant greasy little net-troll who can go piss up a rope. I mod comments anyways, so no posting for either of you... Neener neener neener!
The challenge is: Get the machine all set up, but it has to be in Japanese, which I do not understand, and I have to set it up in English, which the intended user does not understand.
Step One: grab any XP Pro cd iso one can find in dark places, as long as it has SP3 slipstreamed into it. We need the SP3 because the hard drive is bigger than 120gb. Burn the iso, pop into the machine and install.
Grrrrrrr! stupid thing installed with a pie-r8 serial number/ license key!! grrrrr! Can't connect to the net like that! Find an XP key changer, use it to get the legal license key into the beast.
Step 3: Find some drivers: At least the lan driver so it can connect to the net, and the video driver. We hope the automatic driver search can find the rest. OH.. one more thing.
Grab an Anti-Virus program and get it into the machine, via usb key BEFORE hooking it to the net. AVIRA runs in japanese, is free, and doesn't steall too much processing power.
Install, reboot, install, reboot etc.. Curses to Fujitsu for not putting the sound drivers up on the net. Find some other drivers for another machine, unpack the installer with win rar, point the manual driver install at the directory one unpacked into, and yes, yes, yes, done..
Now for the Japanese part. Thank all the gods of Japan, and one demi-gawd in Redmond that this particular piece of Fujitsu office - iron came with an XP Pro sticker. XP pro is the one thing that can ran multiple languages, and in that I mean. . .
JAPANESE MENUS...
That's right, not just typing Japanese in, and seeing it in the browser, but having ALL the menus in Japanese, even the context menus and help balloons.
For this one requires the XP Pro MUI aka the Multilingual User Interface pack.
The idea was that in your office, Joe Blow logged on at the workstation at 6pm and got English, and Joe Takahashi logged in at 6am or whatever and got Japanese.
The full MUI pack is 3 CDs and hard to find, even on rapidshare (hint). You need only the one CD image (iso file) that has Japanese on it ...
Hey.. this would work for Bulgarian too, or Russian, or?
Yup, in fact the worldwide demand for local language XP installations is what helped me find this
stuff without TOO MUCH trouble.
A Usb key with the root of the CD image and the Japanese subdirectory was all I needed to install the MUI. Yup it worked fine with SP3 English in. Just for fun I ran SP3 Japanese too.
Then the MUI Japanese help file updates.
Finally, connect the the interwebs, update everything watch the Microsoft legit-check bless the beast and then switch over to Japanese.
Done!
Did I mention one needs a working machine with a cd burner, hooked to the interwebs to track all this stuff down? At least Japanese high-speed internet is very very fast - it will take longer to figure out the advantages of using google.ca instead of google.com (which will auto-forward you to google.co.jp and put EVERYTHING IN JAPANESE grrrr!!!) than it will to download your stuff.
There were a few more glitches with the hardware, of course, but that's the official way to do it.. The bios "forgetting" that the hard drive existed had nothing to do with the XP install (pull bios battery, wait, reset the bios, put the coin cell back in..)
Also stuck in CCleaner (run in Eng, then toggle over to JP, set to auto-clean at start),
and a few other tweaks and to have a serviceable light use XP machine, that wont get into too much trouble.
Hooray...
So, for all you gaijin teaching English in Japan, who want to know how to do it, and how to set your machine to be either Japanese menu or English .. Just follow these steps, and read the details on each software bundle you snag.
You can either run as one user and ride the Region and Language options tab in the Control panel, or set up two USERS, one Japanese, one English and practice using XP/JP for work.
Damn! looks like Bill got one right.. And don't mention that fashionista Jobs. . .
50$ would get you a used 2nd gen. 4Gb ipod. . .
50$ would get you a used 2nd gen. 4Gb ipod. . .
The machine that changes history is the machine the masses can afford.
All over the world..
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