Chuwi Hi8 - Chinese Windows 8.1 Adventure

[WuddaWaste]

Finally got my Chuwi Hi8 today (after a little debacle with my local delivery service yesterday).

Fired it up and..... Windows is in Chinese. I'm been fumbling with it trying to update via my cell phone's tether. I've kicked Gearbest an email to see if they have recommendations. In the meantime, I'm kind of in half-translated limbo with most of Windows.

It's a bummer 'cuz I was intending on giving this as a trial to an organization that might buy a bunch of them. They're all Apple people so, unfortunately, if I take this to them as-is, they'll just use it as extra ammunition about how much better iPads are and how, despite not having budget for them, they should cut funds from the underlings to justify buying iPads for the higher ups.

I'll come back here after I figure it out. So far, YouTube seems to suggest other tablets have some setting this one does not.

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I think I finally got it. I've hardly ever used Windows 8 before, so fumbling around in it today was hard enough in English, let alone Chinese. As an incomplete re-cap, here's basically what I did (minus the stuff that was obviously counterproductive, like uninstalling my language pack on accident from clicking the wrong Chinese characters):

1. Put phone into Wifi Hotspot mode
2. Connect tablet to phone
3. ***USE GOOGLE TRANSLATE ON PHONE TO NAVIGATE THRU TABLET***
4. Try to find the Control Panel (FYI, slide from right, choose Settings, choose option at the bottom)
5. Go into Date / Time / Language / Region settings
6. Download/Install English (USA)
7. Move "English (USA)" to the top.
8. Remove "Chinese" from installed languages
9. Reboot the tablet
10. See that some of the languages changed from Chinese to English.
11. Go into Settings again, and now there's an option on the left pane (third or so from the bottom) that wasn't there before. It's called Time and Language in English.
12. The second option in that menu is "Language". Click on there.
13. The top area has something to do with customizing the tablet based on region. I clicked the drop-down list and there was a huuuuuuge list of every country imaginable... except it was in Chinese. I took picture after picture of various parts of the drop-down list until one of the countries came up translated as "Canada". CLOSE ENOUGH! BOOYAH! Click!
14. The bottom area of that menu was to set the system language. USA English was already there as the only language, but I had to go into "Options" for that and re-download/install the language pack.
15. Reboot again.

Now everything seems normal except a couple of apps. I suspect these are Chinese apps and that I can remove them. Will find out later today.

[edcoolio]

What a hassle! You would figure they would just simply have language options at boot (each language selection in its own language of course). What about someone who is French, Spanish, or Thai?!

You stuck to it, I'm impressed! I think I would have just taken it out during an extended range session...

[cookiedough]

This is fairly standard for China brand tablets to come set to Chinese. Couple of clicks to change locale and language, should be good to go.

[WuddaWaste]

Yeah, I obviously wasn't the first one to use this tablet. It already had a Windows account setup as username "j" so I figure someone else did a quick check for quality control purposes and probably was supposed to set the language. Didn't happen. Fortunately, no biggie.

Amidst the mess I did find out via Googling that Windows 8 had one version of licensing called "single language". I was crossing my fingers that my license was not that license. I'd have been so boned.

[zijin_cheng]

Ah haha that is to be expected if you are not chinese. I am chinese with rather poor mandarin skills and I still have trouble reading computer specific words in mandarin.