English web-pages on a Japanese version of Windows

Got an intersting question the other day on viewing English Pages on a Japanese version of Windows. It said, "I'm English speaking in Japan. My laptop has Windows XP Professional (Japanese). I've a major problem with Microsoft websites – most of the pages come in Japanese. For example - when I access Windows Live Ideas ideas.live.com/ I get Japanese page, and I have no idea how to view the English page. www.microsoft.com opens in English, but when I click on Support, it opens Japanese page. This is very difficult as I have very limited knowledge of Japanese. Help."

What was happening was because he was running the Japanese version of Windows, his IE default language setting was set to Japanese. Thus each time he went to a Microsoft web site, the web site ask the browser what language it wanted the content in and the broswer said "Japanese". To fix this I showed them how to set the default content language to English.

I am assumed they were using IE 6. So here is how I told them they would be able to see English pages

1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Click Tools.
3. Click Internet Options.
4. Click the General tab, and then click Languages.
5. Click English, and then click Move Up to move English to the top of the list of languages.

This way, when asked which language to serve information in, the browser now tells the server English. You can do this for any langauge you want, but realize that some we sites may not ask this question nor if the do they may not have content in the language you set. Thus is will try to deliver the best it can.