Fun with Microsoft Windows... (not!)

One of the side effects I had noticed with my previous two computers when I added Russian support to the machine's configuration was how somehow, the "locale" of my operating system got changed to Russian as well.

This change only really made itself apparent when certain applications—notably Skype—updated themselves, because all of the interaction with the user was in Russian. (Fortunately, this kind of thing is not a problem for me, but I digress...).

After installing Russian support on the Windows 8 machine, I did notice that the locale had remained English, but didn't think too much about it, until a problem cropped up a couple of days ago, when a client sent me a zip file containing a whole lot of photographs with Cyrillic file names. Try as we might, there was no way I could open the file and have the names display properly.

At first I thought it might be some kind of mail problem, but after eliminating all the alternatives, the only last-ditch attempt we had left in our bag of tricks was to send the file through Skype.

The transfer went through, and when I opened the file on my Windows 7 machine (I wasn't too excited about installing Skype on the new machine), the file names in the zip file were what the doctor ordered.

Today, however, when I moved the file to my Windows 8 machine, the very same zip file showed it contained files with garbage file names. This pretty much narrowed down the problem to... my new computer.

Then I started to think about the locale issue, and after finding a Microsoft support article that spoke of a similar problem in Windows 7, I became convinced the key to solving the problem was to set my new machine's locale to Russian.

I did, and the problem went away.

* * *I'm finding this sort of thing on just about 16-inch centers with both Windows 8 and Office 365 (which I got on the basis of numerous enthusiastic reviews from people known to me personally, and whose credibility has significantly degraded as a result). Stuff has a tendency to go wrong for no apparent reason, and no discernible rhyme.

I've already written of Word's built-in inability to allow a user to migrate a configuration without going what feel like the labors of Hercules. Since then, I've found that a good one-third of the macros I've constructed for Word 2010 terminate with errors in the version of Word in Office 365. In addition, several useful functions have moved from where I had become accustomed to finding them, and a few have simply disappeared (as far as I can tell).

It's almost as if Microsoft has begun to source its product designers from Adobe, you know?

* * *I managed to get the May invoices out, a little late, but out. The month was not terrible, but nothing to write to the Guinness editorial board about, either.

I am well past the halfway mark of the 20,000-word job that landed on my hard drive on Friday, and hope to get it done in time to deliver soon.

And it occurs to me I still have a whole lot of file names to translate.

Cheers...