Getting rid of Chinese! (language, not people)

I am an America in Shanghai China and my laptop hard drive went belly up. I don't want to deal with that here, so I just bought a cheap Toshiba T210 running Windows 7 Basic at the market and I gave my old laptop away.

I wrongly assumed that the language Windows uses was just a simply setting, but apparently it is more comprehensive than that. The store that I bought the laptop from did reload the entire machine from scratch (after language problems on the first day of ownership) and changed some unknown-to-me settings.

Mostly everything works just fine with little evidence of the Chinese language. The problem is that some programs are still installing in Chinese and it is a major pain to correct them when you can't read the words! (Two examples are AVG Free and CrashPlan Pro) I would like to make sure that everything on my computer points to US English so that I don't have to deal with this forever.

So after doing some more research I came across the Region and Language settings box. Format, Location and Default Input Language settings. All of these were changed to English before I had the installation problems.

Does anybody know where else I can look? Somehow certain programs still think that I want to read in Chinese! Thanks.

Have you changed the system locale?

Change the system locale

Yup, system locale is also set to United States. Every setting that I could find in the Region and Language dialog box have been set to English / United States.

I'm guessing that there is still something lingering in the registry somewhere, but I don't want to start dinking around in there and cause more damage.

I believe you will find the Key is locked to CHINA only.

Try uninstalling AVG completely, also remove any leftover folders in C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\ and C:\ProgramData. Then run the CCleaner registry clean, then reinstall AVG making sure you select English as the setup language.

Thanks for the warm welcome, guys!

It's Windows 7 Basic for sure. The only way for a Chinese copy of Basic to be in English (without upgrading) is to hack it? Crap.

I have performed all of the Windows upgrades on the machine with no problems. Is there a way that I can check validity so that I can go back to the shop with problems now? (I'm leaving China in three weeks and heading to Australia)

Another alternative I'm curious about: my old laptop is still here and runs Home Premium. Is there a way for me to upgrade my new Toshiba laptop to Home Premium with the license from my old laptop? The hard drive is crapping out on it anyway, and since I don't have disks or anything the new owner will have to reload it with a new OS.

If I don't worry about this until it "becomes a problem" then I would probably be looking at a forced upgrade to an English-language version of Windows 7 later, right?

Bill2 said:

Try uninstalling AVG completely, also remove any leftover folders in C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\ and C:\ProgramData. Then run the CCleaner registry clean, then reinstall AVG making sure you select English as the setup language.

AVG is in English now, so that isn't a problem. The problem was that it took me 15 minutes to get it into English when it was installing. I don't want that to be a problem for future programs that I install.

So could I just run CCleaner now, without uninstalling anything?

There is also a chance seeing as you mentioned 3rd party software:

Two examples are AVG Free and CrashPlan Pro

That it's a Government thing. Only Chinese language software available in China?

I mean, we are talking China with its limited nanny state Internet.

Just a thought...