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We're running a localized Windows XP installation. While this is not a problem itself, it appears that a lot of websites present themselves localized.

Is there a way to change the language of Windows XP "under the hood" so that this installation won't appear localized to websites? I don't even know how they do that - the user agent looks like that:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.986.0 Safari/535.15

It's also not based on our IP address.

I already tried changing the regional and language settings in the control panel to no avail.

Thanks for any hints.

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It should not be necessary to reinstall Windows XP with a different language. Web sites usually use the HTTP headers sent by the client browser to initially detect which language to display to the user and subsequently store the users preference in a cookie or similar.

Visit http://myproxylists.com/my-http-headers with the browser in question and pay particular attention to the following two headers:

HTTP_USER_AGENT == Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE == sv-se,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3

As you can see in my case I've configured Firefox with a preference to use Swedish (sv-se) first and then English (en-us). If these headers contain the language that you want to avoid, try playing around with the configuration of your browser and/or Windows XP to see if that makes a difference. It might also be worth removing any cookies (clear recent history) for the websites that you've already visited to make sure that they do not contain any saved language preferences.

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  • Cheers, that did it!
    – aukaost
    Apr 28, 2012 at 6:36

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