Arabic-L:GEN:MS Windows 98 Arabic respons

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 12 Mar  2004
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:MS Windows 98 Arabic respons

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1)
Date: 12 Mar 2004
From:Mutarjm at aol.com
Subject:MS Windows 98 Arabic respons

If I may offer a suggestion, you would do much better, at this  
stage, to forego using MS Windows 98 Arabic as your OS and (assuming  
your PC can handle and support then) instead get the "plan vanilla" /  
out of the box MS Windows XP (Home or Professional Edition) and MS  
Office XP.
   
When you install MS Windows XP, you can add Arabic language support  
(NOTE: select the "Arabic, Saudi" option that appears in the drop-down  
list because that has full support).
   
The basic CD for Windows XP contains multilingual support, including  
right-to-left drivers and keyboard configurations for Arabic, Farsi and  
Kurdish. You would not need extra special software add-ons.
 
Windows XP is much more stable and reliable than were the earlier  
bilingual Arabic versions of Windows 98 or MSME, and your MS Excel XP  
would operate much more smoothly, bidhin Allah.
   
As an Arabic beta tester in Microsoft's Arabic Beta Program for over  
eight years, I have worked through / endured most versions of  
MS Windows and MS Office. MS decided to adopt UNICODE in Win 2000 and  
later versions. That smart shift to UNICODE thereby saved  
MS considerable R&D funds and customer good will, as the proprietary  
encoding that MS used beforehand was (ahem...) not always compatible  
with other people's PC and settings.

Arabic-supported operation (esp. MS Word, PPT, Excel and Publisher)  
inside MS Windows XP and MS Office XP is like watching a racing  
"gezaala" after you have been driving a ponderous "qamooSA" of Win 98,  
by comparison.
 
(MS recently stopped technical supprot of MS Windows 98, so I have  
heard.)
 
Hope this helps.
   
Khair, in sha' Allah.
 
Regards,

Stephen H. Franke
San Pedro, California

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End of Arabic-L:  12 Mar  2004