USA vs England Laptop?

Hi,

A lady from work asked me to look at her husbands laptop...if she wasn't so cute I would have said "no" as I don't really care to do this anymore.

Anyway, the laptop is originally from England. She said that there are some minor differences that she has noticed. It won't play USA dvd's and a couple of the keys are in different locations.

Can someone confirm the DVD thing? Do they have different versions of XP or Windows 7? Would a retail dvd (software) purchased from a US store work in it?

Call me sheltered, but living in the USA I've never had to look into this.

Thanks in advance.

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Comments

ptilsen

DVD players have region codes. They can be changed.

jvrlopez

Yes, laptops and desktops vary depending on the region you buy them in. I can't stand using my wife's laptop since it's from Japan and the keys are different (the right shift key is tiny and the manner in which you input characters varies if you're using Roman or Hiragana characters).

The keyboard is probably set to "English (United Kingdom)" hence the difference in keys and input. You can change this in Control Panel >>> Regional and Language Options >>> Keyboards and Languages >>> Change Keyboard >>> Add >>> English (United States). This will help with the input, but I'm not sure how this would work with the keyboard being integrated into the laptop, but worth a look into.

To alternate between the keyboard layouts and settings, hit alt+shift. This helps out wonders for my wife when she uses my computer and needs to switch over to input Hiragana, Kanji, or Katakana characters (she is from Japan).

The dvd player is set with a certain region in order to prevent use of media from other regions.

It can changed as stated above, however, you only have a limited amount of changes before it locks to the last change.

The quickest and easiest way to change the region is just insert a DVD from the region you wish to have as default and try to play it under WMP. You should receive a prompt alerting you as to the conflict and if you desire to change it. It will also show the amount of changes remaining.

Tackle

Thanks for the tips!

Maybe I'll create a USB installer for ease of re-installation.

jamesleecoleman

So basically, I would have to buy a DVD burners from different countries so I can play the DVD's without any problems?

jvrlopez

Thatll work but thats more work than necessary.

You can buy them locally and change the region on them by using media from a different region.

You might be able to buy a region free drive and I believe you can flash drives to be region free if you want to.

ptilsen

jamesleecoleman wrote: »

So basically, I would have to buy a DVD burners from different countries so I can play the DVD's without any problems?

Do you need to play DVDs from more than one country? If not, you need only change the region once on the drive. You don't need to purchase another drive.

qwertyiop

You could attempt to unlock the DVD player How to Unlock the DVD Region on Mac and PC for Free