So I've got a funny story about a Dell notebook...

[Imakeholesinu]

My girlfriend is from Japan. She has this old IBM ThinkPad that she got a few years ago from her father. After she started having problems with it and wanted to start using it at the local coffee shops with WiFi, she decided that she needed to get a new one. After I did some browsing with her, she decided on a Dell Insperion 6000. I recommeded this notebook to her after my father has purchased 3 notebooks from Dell and absolutely loves them. After she put her order in on the japanese dell site, a few days later they e-mailed her saying that they didn't have the integrated intel videocard and she was forced to go with an ATI X300 with Hypermemory (joy /sarcasim). This was of course with no cost at no cost to her. Today, she recieved an e-mail from her father saying that the notebook is being sent from the states to Japan. We had both assumed it would be manufactured in Japan but apparently not. So now the notebook will have travelled to the land of the rising sun and back to America to her. I hope this notebook is worth the money. Pentium M ftw!

[Imakeholesinu]

More on the story. So we get the notebook today from Japan and we're both excited because she wants to watch DVD's from her country on the notebook. Well guess what. Dell, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put a region 1 drive on the laptop. So now, we're getting ready to get on the phone with technical services to see if there is someway to force the drive to region 2 or to make it region free. I've tried AnyDVD to no avail.

[NAiLs]

Right click My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager

Select your DVD ROM drive... right click the drive -> Properties. Click DVD Region. Just be reminded that you can only change the region FOUR times.

Hope that solves your problem.



The other way you can do it is find a region free program around the net. I found a few a while ago, but my hard drive has crashed since then and I have no clue what they are anymore.