Halp!

June 27, 2007 10:20 AM

Do you read japanese? I was given a japanese laptop which has both a Japanese and English (American) character keyboard. I installed WinXP and created an account name and login / PW. It worked fine then i turned it off. Now the login / PW no longer work. I strongly suspect the problem is the keyboard has toggled to the Japanese character entry mode, while the login / PW is in English characters. And so I am locked out unless I can figure out how to toggle the keyboard back to English. Please view this high res image of the keyboard ( http://bayimg.com/hacgmaABI )and see if you can tell which Japanese character keys or key combination might toggle the keyboard between the two character sets. Mucho Arigato!
posted by Fupped Duck to computers & internet (8 comments total)

On the right side of the keyboard, to the left of the Alt key, it says "katakana, hiragana, romaji" (written top to bottom). I'd guess that you toggle that one to its third position (romaji) to be able to type in the Roman alphabet.
posted by xo at 10:36 AM on June 27, 2007

I was just gonna post what xo said, but with one addition: If hitting that button alone doesn't do anything, you might need to hit the Alt key to get romaji.
posted by phatkitten at 10:39 AM on June 27, 2007

You need to switch to "hangaku mode" to enter in password in English. Press the button above the tab key on the left to toggle to it (there are three settings - the one without the line underneath is normal English input.)
posted by dydecker at 10:43 AM on June 27, 2007

Also, just so you know if you're typing in English or not, select the user name input and type a few characters in there so you can preview what you're typing.
posted by zephyr_words at 11:11 AM on June 27, 2007

IIRC The default keypress to change language input under XP is left shift + left alt.

Do you see any square indicating what language you are inputting? English should be EN, Japanese, JP?
posted by mphuie at 11:23 AM on June 27, 2007

its just the pw login and the characters are therefore supressed... But Zephyr's suggestion is very helpful.
posted by Fupped Duck at 11:36 AM on June 27, 2007

If you want to see what you are typing, just press
Control + Alt + Delete twice at the welcome screen, then you can type in the Username box that pops up.
posted by pombiki at 12:14 PM on June 27, 2007

Just pressing the escape key worked in the computer lab at my Japanese university.
posted by Alison at 12:56 PM on June 27, 2007