I work at a small company that occasionally sets up laptops and sends them out to clients. As part of a rush job while our IT guy is on vacation, we’ve inadvertantly ended up with a couple of Toshiba Tecra laptops running Windows XP Pro French edition. :smack:
None of our corporate clients are francophones, and since we’ve opened the boxes, neither the supplier nor Toshiba will take them back.
Now, we could buy two more copies of XP Pro, but I don’t think we should have to. Uh, right, the question: We have install CDs for XP Pro, and I believe we have restore CDs for this type of laptop someplace. Will the CD Key from the bottom of the laptops work if we re-image using either of these options?
Check the setupp.ini file located in the French and English install media under the i386 directory. If the PID is the same, the same key will work. Check references here and here.
It’s even possible to change the PID in your install media and re-burn the CD. Check out how to create your own ISO image here.
bouv - Sadly no. This is the french version; Démarrer button, Mes documents, Panneau de configuration, etc. All changing the input language will do is change the character mapping of some of my keyboard keys, and a few other things.
Given that they’re our laptops now, and they can’t really be more useless, I’m going to see if I have time to re-image them tomorrow.
Well, the recovery process eventually completed, but when it started it wanted to activate right away before letting me log in, which was a pain 'cause none of the network devices were working.
I was reminded that if you select the “Telephone” option, you can change the product ID, which I did (to the one on the sticker on the bottom), then after speaking numbers to a computer for a while, it activated and Windows was fine.
Unfortunately, while doing the install I also noticed that the laptop keyboard is French, so instead of “Delete” I hit “Suppr”, and instead of caps lock, it’s got “Fix Maj”. Our IT guy returns next week though, so we’ll just order some replacement keyboards (~100$) and ship them out.
So it’s all turned out ok, except we’re out 2x100$ on keyboards and however much time it took to get this circus going. Oh yeah, anyone want to two French-layout keyboards for a Toshiba Tecra? Barely used!
