The Best English & Japanese Windows 95 Solution

Q. As a bilingual user, I naturally want my computer to be bilingual -- but Windows 95 doesn't make the task easy. Without considerable sleight-of-hand during installation, like the manual procedure described in your December 1995 issue, or g oing out and buying an expensive third-party remedy like System Commander, covered in your June 1996 issue, putting both English and Japanese Win95 on the same computer seems to be "mission impossible." Hasn't Microsoft come up with a sensible solution yet?

A. Microsoft hasn't -- but a Microsoft programmer has. In late May, William Rollison, a systems test engineer in Microsoft's International Systems Group, stopped by our editorial offices to demonstrate his WinBoot installation utility. While Mic rosoft does not support this valuable utility, Rollison does.

WinBoot enables easy installation and switching between multiple language versions of Win95 installed on one computer. Rollison reports that in tests he has crammed as many as 27 different language versions onto a single computer.

The procedure for installing a second (or third, or fourth) version of Windows 95 on your computer with WinBoot is easy. First, copy the WinBoot files to the C: drive root directory. Then, simply launch WINBOOT.EXE, click the Setup check box, and then click OK. This is the "point of no return"; proceeding will rename critical system files and restart your system in real mode DOS.

If you're installing Win95 from a CD-ROM, make sure that you have the required real mode CD-ROM drivers in your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. Otherwise, you may find yourself with no access to your CD-ROM drive and no easy way to recover to your original configuration.

When WinBoot reboots the computer in real mode DOS, you're ready to install an additional version of Windows 95. Follow the normal installation procedure -- but make sure that you install in a new directory or you'll overwrite the previous version.

The WinBoot help file strongly advises that Japanese Windows 95 be the last of the two or more Win95 versions that you install on your computer. (Based on our Win95 installation tests here at Computing Japan, this is sound advice no matter what installation method you attempt.) Certain Japanese Win95 device drivers (notably JFONT.SYS and JDISP.SYS) can cause problems when you attempt to install additional language versions of Windows 95.

When you have put two or more language versions of Windows 95 on your system with WinBoot, switching between them is also easy: Just launch WINBOOT.EXE (we recommend creating a shortcut on the desktop), choose the language to boot from the drop-down l ist box (only your installed languages will appear as choices), and press OK. WinBoot will then reboot your computer in the selected language.

One caution: don't use English disk tool utilities (like scandisk or defrag) on a drive that contains Japanese files. A US- or European-version disk utility can corrupt Japanese double-byte character set (DBCS) data and file names. If you have Japanes e or another Far East language version installed, always change to that version and use its DBCS-enabled utilities.

So, which is the better choice for installation: System Commander or WinBoot? If you need such features as virus detection and password protection, or think that you might want to install a non-Win95 operating system (like Linux or NetWare), then buy System Commander. But if you have a secure system and know that multiple language version of Windows 95 will satisfy your computing needs, WinBoot is the solution you're looking for. And the price is right!