AppLocale is a tool for

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

and

Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, 2 ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. It is a launcher application that makes it possible to run non-

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

(

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a single byte. (In some co ...

-based) applications in a locale of the user's choice. Since changing the locale normally requires a restart of Windows, AppLocale is especially popular with western users of Asian applications. The program installs itself in a subfolder of the Windows directory called "AppPatch", and when launched prompts the user for an executable to run and the desired codepage. It can also create a shortcut in the start menu, located under Microsoft AppLocale, however you will be prompted by AppLocale before the program's launch. AppLocale works with many, but not all non-Unicode applications, and as such is still inferior to really setting the particular locale systemwide. In particular, it requires

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

s for the particular locale to be installed on the system it runs on, and Administrator privileges to be installed (though not to be used). It is not officially supported for use with Windows Vista or Windows 7; a person who is using Vista or 7 must either alter the system locale manually, or use an available unofficial workaround to install the AppLocale utility (see below). AppLocale is not included in normal retail versions of Windows, but is available for free download from Microsoft's website.

Bugs

Compatibility

Running AppLocale on

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

is not officially supported and it fails to install on default configurations of these OS if attempted; however there is
workaround to install it
(which requires starting apploc.msi file from command prompt under administrative privileges). This workaround also works for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. However, it no longer works on

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

. AppLocale cannot run on

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...

platforms. In September 2016, Microsoft removed all pages referring to Applocale, including the official download, from the Microsoft website, thereby officially discontinuing all support (since it was only ever supported officially on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003). However, it can still be retrieved from the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Mojibake issue

AppLoc.tmp in the AppPatch folder (''%windir%\apppatch'') causes a

Mojibake Mojibake ( ja, 文字化け; , "character transformation") is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, ofte ...

issue of

Windows Installer Windows Installer (msiexec.exe, previously known as Microsoft Installer, codename Darwin) is a software component and application programming interface (API) of Microsoft Windows used for the installation, maintenance, and removal of software. ...

. Unofficial solutions of this problems include a modified version of the program, called pAppLocale provided by Hung-Te Lin (林弘德 ''piaip'') for free,pAppLocale
/ref> or blanking the ''AppLoc.tmp'' file, then setting it to read only.

References

''Parts of this article are from the Microsoft AppLocale article from the

Chinese Wikipedia The Chinese Wikipedia () is the written vernacular Chinese (a form of Mandarin Chinese) edition of Wikipedia. It is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Started on 11 May 2001, the Chinese Wikipedia currently has articles and registered users, of ...

External links

Microsoft's official download page for AppLocale (broken link)

Workaround to Install Microsoft AppLocale Utility in Windows Vista
Microsoft software Application launchers Internationalization and localization {{Windows-software-stub