Dictionary and Mouse Settings on XP

BenEadir

Hi all,

Long story short is I have a Dell D620 which was originally installed with Vista but that cracked me up so I had it removed and XP installed by a reputable IT repair company.

Life is much better in XP world with the exception of two small but VERY annoying things:-

1. No matter what I do I can't get Office applications to retain English (Ireland) or English (UK) as the default dictionary, they always revert to English (USA) and as a result I end up with silly spelling with all "ised" turned to "ized" and "Colour" to "color" etc. I'm crap/lazy with spelling anyway so really need proper English. I've tried setting the dictionary to Irish or UK English within Word and English (Ireland) is set as the language in Regional settings in the Control Panel as well as changing the keyboard layout to "English (Ireland)" but still the default everyting I open a document is US English. Can anyone help me with this?

2. The other annoying thing is I use a docking station and wireless keyboard and mouse at work but when I bring the laptop home and open it up the pointer speed setting for the touchpad always reverts to a slow setting. I have to go into Control Panel/Mouse/Pointer Options every time, move the slider to the right, click on enhance pointer precision and then I can effectively use the touchpad but once I close the machine down it reverts to the old slow setting. Any ideas?

All suggestions much appreciated.

Ben

Alun

I should first say that my experience is based on older versions of Word, so things might have moved on since then, but anyway ...

New Word documents are based by default on the normal.dot template, and take their language settings from that. Load up normal.dot in Word, select the whole document (ctrl-A) change the language to English (UK) or (Ireland) and save it again. That should solve it for any new documents you create (at least based on normal.dot, that is, if you use any other standard templates, you should do the same to them as well).

For existing documents you need to do the same thing, i.e. open the document, ctrl-A, change language and re-save.

The reason for this is that Word allows you to actually have multiple languages within one document, so just selecting a different language with the cursor placed somewhere in the text just inserts a code there to say that all text from that point on is in, say, English (UK), but you could just as well select a block of text and tell it that that bit is in French, or German or whatever.

Hope this helps. Don't know anything about the other problem though, sorry.

BenEadir

Hi Alun,

Thanks for the tip. I've searched for "normal.dot" on my machine including in hidden folders etc but can't find it. Is there a speacial way to open it and once it's open do I just make the change then save and close it?

Thanks for your help on this.

Ben

Alun

BenEadir wrote: »

Thanks for the tip. I've searched for "normal.dot" on my machine including in hidden folders etc but can't find it. Is there a speacial way to open it and once it's open do I just make the change then save and close it?

It should be in C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates where <your user name> is whatever user name you log into XP under. Yes, just open it, make the changes, and then re-save it.