Monday, October 20, 2008

Japanese Keyboard Undetected

After installing a Japanese edition of Windows XP onto an HP desktop with a Japanese keyboard I was surprised to discover that it thought it was connected to a keyboard with a US "international" layout. When I installed the OS it had been attached to a US keyboard, but Windows hadn't updated when I swapped the proper keyboard in.

In the "Regional and Language Options" control panel "Text Services and Input Languages" was set to "Japanese." I couldn't find anywhere else to change the setting until I found this helpful entry. Windows needs to be forced to use the Japanese driver.

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Friday, September 19, 2008

Windows Updates Fail: Register wups2.dll

Working on restoring a bunch of desktops to their pristine state I discovered that one of them could no longer install Windows updates.

It's an HP Compaq d530 SFF, although I'm not sure that the hardware had much to do with this problem. After restoring the HDD to the factory state using the original Windows XP SP2 CDs, and installing SP3, I discovered that every Windows update attempt failed.

Apparently there is a dll that needs to be registered and installing SP3 right after restoring the system can cause this.

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