Prez Sez: Dec. 1996

by Pat Hughes

Greetings once again and apologies for not getting there until the end of my first meeting — good job by Ken Cotton (VP) running his first meeting and thank you Jerry for the NT 4.0 presentation. My late arrival was due to a delayed departure from Malaysia (a passenger required medical attention) and my one computer related comment is that with only one Internet Service Provider it is another country with an up and coming market!

Since I now have to stand up at TPC meetings and can be easily identified, I think it is time to keep an old promise and do a review of WinBoot — a program for running multiple language copies of Win 95.

I installed WinBoot several months ago in order to run Win 95 English and Japanese on one machine. During those months I've switched back and forth dozens of times with no problems. Though I usually work under the Win 95J shell and run English programs with no problems, I sometimes switch to Win 95E to confirm any questions or problems that may arise.

Usage: A click of an icon and the program asks you to select from a list of languages to reboot your system to. (The author claims to have had up to 27 different languages on one machine—an indication not only of the versatility of the program but of how widespread Windows has become!) The system then re-starts your computer in the selected language. Two clicks — that's it!

Installation: you must install English Windows first. If you have another language already installed (e.g. Japanese) then remove it and install Win 95 English first. (No way around it; I had to do it too.). Once installed you then run the WinBoot program from inside Win 95 English. You select "Click here only to install a new language version of Windows 95" and then "OK". The program does some backup copying of files and then you install. (Actually it's been a while now but I'm sure it was nothing more complicated than this.) There is a "Help" button of course (this is a Windows program written by MS people) that will give you some warnings and info.

The first point to make clear from the Help file is that "this program may not be redistributed in any form, or posted on a public BBS." Thus you will not find it on the TPC BBS but rather must go to one of the two following addresses:

http://www. cjmag.co.jp/editors/utility.html
http://www. microsoft.com/globaldev/gbl-gen/intlboot.htm

The second one speaks for itself, the first in case you don't recognize the address is the online Computing Japan which is worth a look in itself. It was an article in their magazine several months ago that led me to this program.

The second point to make clear is that the WinBoot utility "is not a Microsoft product, and will not be supported by Microsoft." Yes, it was written by an engineer at MS to make it easier for those of us wanting/needing to switch between languages but at this time it is not an official MS product. In the future? Hey, your guess is as good as mine but I hope it becomes an official utility.

Warnings: these are covered in the program but a quick list is: a) no use of compression is allowed (e.g. DoubleSpace) b) don't use WinBoot with Win NT 4.0 c) do your Defrag under Win95 J not under Win 95E. Why? The English version will get confused when it sees Japanese double-byte file names.

And from my experience these additional warnings:

1) You now have a Config.sys & Autoexec.bat for each language setting. Since your previous setting may have been used as the basis for the new one, check the contents of each to make sure they are appropriate.

2) I had Win 95J on my system originally so I had to get rid of it as I explained above. However, Uninstall didn't seem to catch everything so I then used "C:\Deltree Windows" to get rid of the original Japanese Windows contents. Then I installed the Win 95 English version.

Advantage: I didn't need to have multiple HDDs or multiple partitions on my HDD. I do have both languages on one system and switch back and forth with two clicks. When I use an English program under both systems I install it twice so that both understand it (e.g., the English version of Netscape). No problems unless I have Japanese characters which are not displayed on Win 95E but are fine when I go back to Win 95J. Installing twice might sound like a bother but it means I can use it under either system in the same way. Of course, I can't use Japanese software under Win 95E—or can I? Display of Japanese in Win 95E can be done using other utilities but that is for another article.

If you try it out let me know how it goes. I've no complaints but if you do let's hear and relay them to the software designers. No promise that they'll fix it but they were responsive to me when I was locating the program. Good luck and I hope this has been of use to you!

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