Forums @ Prydwen.net

Anyone know if it is possible to change the default spell check language in Windows mail in Vista, to UK English? It's driving me nuts when the spell check suggests US English corrections!

Thanks.

I'd like to believe it depends on the computer's regional settings in control panel - check they're all set to British English. I could be wrong, but it seems idiotic that a Microsoft product would not use OS settings but then again it is Microsoft so who knows

Gandelf wrote:Anyone know if it is possible to change the default spell check language in Windows mail in Vista, to UK English? It's driving me nuts when the spell check suggests US English corrections!

Thanks.

Turn of spell check.
embrace your dyslexia

Lieva wrote:Turn of spell check.
embrace your dyslexia

I actually thought that nobody used spellcheck

/Ankh

[quote="Xest"]I'd like to believe it depends on the computer's regional settings in control panel - check they're all set to British English. I could be wrong, but it seems idiotic that a Microsoft product would not use OS settings but then again it is Microsoft so who knows ]

The regional settings are set to British. I've been searching on Google for help on the matter, but from what I've read I'm under the impression that for the time being at least, Vista Windows Mail doesn't have regional language variations.

It would seem that these other language options are something that will be patched in with future Vista updates. I truly hope that is the case, because I don't believe Microsoft would shoot itself in the foot and force US English on every English-speaking, Microsoft-using person in the world.

<ankh> wrote:I actually thought that nobody used spellcheck

/Ankh

I used to but the millions of spelling errors i make used to drive me batty so turned it off

its more proffesional to use it though.
Wish they did at work

Having an advert for a Casiono was amusing but looked stupid

[quote="Xest"]I'd like to believe it depends on the computer's regional settings in control panel - check they're all set to British English. I could be wrong, but it seems idiotic that a Microsoft product would not use OS settings but then again it is Microsoft so who knows ]

The same Microsoft that suggests changing from English (British) to English (US) when you update your browser to IE7... I updated my browser so now I want to change my language?

That the option on the site it loads after you first install it? Think I remember seeing that too, found it pretty amusing Still, if you've seen the Firefox 2 spellchecker, even if you download the British English plugin which is fairly well hidden then you'll never want to use a spellchecker ever again

I think MS is getting better as a company overall to be fair, apart from Windows Genuine Advantage and Product Activation they've been a bit better lately -

-Their games division rocks, the 360 and the MS game studio games have been fantastic this past year or so.

- Office 2007 is a brilliant step up, finally a daring change to the age old interface that actually works - productivity increases are massive for day to day use and for more specialist tasks, some things that used to take you like 45mins can be done in about 60 seconds now.

- Developer stuff is as great as ever, this is a key area MS has always excelled in, Visual Studio, MSDN are as good as ever and the new innovations with .NET and C# really are a massive benefit to developers and end users alike. XNA is real nice too.

- IE7 isn't that bad, if you've done any recent web development complying to the W3C XHTML and CSS2 standards you'll probably already know that IE is really no worse for standards compliance than Firefox anymore - this becomes even more prominent if you use Javascript. Ironically, Opera the browser not so many people use is the browser I've found by far the best for standards compliance however, it really puts Firefox and IE to shame in that respect.

That's not to say MS doesn't have it's problems still, it's struggling in the web search market, the portable music player market (Zune) but at least it's not doing anything morally wrong there, it's just not making the right business decisions.

I wasn't knocking MS' technology, I think they get a lot of stick that they don't deserve.

The biggest issue I have with them at the moment is the anti-British (probably actually anti-non US?) bias with a lot of things, the spell checker being one of them.

The prime example is their Windows (consumer) UK pricing policy... the pound is stronger against the dollar than ever and yet "due to the exchange rate" we have to pay even more!!!

Ovi wrote:The biggest issue I have with them at the moment is the anti-British (probably actually anti-non US?) bias with a lot of things, the spell checker being one of them.

I think it's more budget cutting/laziness rather than specific anti-non US. They just make their dictionary then figure "we'll do the others if/when we have time". It might even be a management thing, the programmers probably put the code in place to handle different dictionaries but if their languages dept. or whatever haven't got the dictionaries made then they ship without, or vice versa (which is probably more likely) - the dictionaries are available but the programmers aren't given time to write full support for them in at release.

Ovi wrote:The prime example is their Windows (consumer) UK pricing policy... the pound is stronger against the dollar than ever and yet "due to the exchange rate" we have to pay even more!!!

It's not just a Microsoft thing though, look at things like the PS3, it's $599 US if you buy in the US or equivalent of $845 if you buy in the UK. You'll see the same pattern with iPod's, DS' and so forth. When we went back to Canada in Feb. to see my gf's relatives we got her a DS and it only cost £60 with the exchange rate (they're ~£95 here), picked up a 4gb iPod nano for about the same too - when both products are region free it's definitely the way to shop! Even fuel in the UK costs literally twice as much per unit than it does in the US/Canada although afaik that's mostly taxes.

I'd blame our goverment if anything for not doing something about us being ripped off, the problem is it benefits them as the more we have to spend the more money they get by way of taxes. We wont see a change therefore until there's more mainstream pressure on the goverment but you wont get that any time soon because too many Brits just assume the prices we pay are fair and normal.

Am looking at moving to Canada in about 3 - 5 years, partly because my gf wants to move back there but partly because taking our strong pound across will give us a very nice way of life - we'll be able to have enough in savings to buy a realy nice house outright there with no mortgage, having that and cars with no debts by the age of 30 is a pretty damn good kickstart in life. Alternatively, we're looking at buying their with a mortgage now, paying it off whilst here and renting it out until we move over but it could be tough because of my gf losing residency (not citizenship though of course!) status for being away from the country for 6months. I'd love to be able to find a way to maintain a revenue stream in the UK whilst living over there ideally, that seems to be the only real way to exploit the strong pound, because I don't think realistically you'll ever be able to exploit it in our own country - even if you import you're looking at large customs taxes + freight charges on a lot of things. It is sad though that us Brits are in a position to play the international market so well with investments, cheap imports and so forth but are denied it by our goverment unless we work hard to work round it - most countries can only dream of even being in that position in the first place, afaik it's only Sweden, Norway and Switzerland that really have currencies as strong as ours.