Adding english language to a chinese market Dell laptop

[Yetiman]

my friend is married to a woman from China. Her son came here with a Dell laptop he bought in China with Windows XP on it in Chinese language.

He has bought a newer laptop to replace it since coming here, and has given the Dell to my friend (his stepfather), but it is of almost no use to him as he is not able to read Chinese.
To make matters worse, they all give me a confused look when I ask for the restore disk.

They would rather not do a fresh install of XP or whatever as they don't want to lose important information that is on the computer, and finding any information on the subject on the microsoft web site has had me chasing my tail for hours.

Any suggestions ?

 

[quikah]

Control Panel > Regional and Language Options

Set everything in there to english. I have no idea if this works in Chinese version of windows, but it works in the opposite way to an extent.

 

[Evander]

You probably won't wanna do this b/c of cost but I'll throw it out anyway- Vista Ultimate is supposed to have the ability to show the interface in the language of your choice. You could do a dual boot so that the preexisting information on XP won't go away.
Amazon is showing it to be just under $200 http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer...&qid=1190760921&sr=8-1
If that's the OEM it probably won't be worth it but if it's the full version you can reinstall it next time you buy a new machine (unlike OEM which is tied to one machine)

Barring that, doing the Regional settings in XP thing (somewhat limited) plus installing English language apps (such as firefox or opera instead of Chinese Internet Explorer) might be sufficient.