谷歌

So I got a new computer at work. My first flatscreen monitor. 17 x 5Ghz processors, and eleventy terrabytes of RAM. Or something like that. It's fast, anyway. Our IT guy set it up with XP Pro, Office 2003, and a viewer thingy called XnView.

I spent a while importing stuff from the old computer. Cursed at Outlook's .pst files a lot. Reinstalled software. It's kind of fun to install software on your upgraded computer because if it's been a couple of years since you've done it, all the installations seem to take half the time.

The problem arose (and you knew it was coming to that), when today I installed the stuff so I can type Chinese. Not that I need to do it all that often, but it's good to have. I use the Microsoft Office IME editor, choose the phonetic input, and map the keyboard to hanyu pinyin. I also use the IME pad, where you can use your mouse to write the Chinese characters. Actually, all I can effectively write with that thing is 一，二， and 三. It's not that I don't know other characters, it's just that my writing resembles that of a three year old, and the software can't make any sense out of my scribbles.

But today, I can't even find the IME pad thing to select it in the 'text services and input languages'. I installed it, but it's just not there. And the phonetic input thing crashes everything that I try to use it with. It crashed Notepad, and I didn't even know you could crash Notepad.

I Googled a bunch trying to find some support for this, and in the search I ran across Google Pinyin. I installed that, and it works great. Real great. I'll even forgive the fact that it shows up in the menu as Chinese (PRC).