Sometimes foreign characters all just appear as a bunch of squares or something else. Japanese characters are one example.

I don't really know how to explain it anymore than that, vger. Like on the internet, if there are Japanese characters on a website or YouTube video, my computer will not read them and instead they will be squares. Same goes on Skype; if a friend has foreign characters in his name, they'll be squares.

That generally happens if you don't have a font or language pack installed that has that character. That happens quite a bit for foriegn characters on web pages. If you can figure out what language it's in you can install the correct font or language pack for it.

That's what I thought. So if I wanted it to read Japanese characters, what would I need to install or download or whatever? I don't even know Japanese anyway lol but I'd rather see the characters than ugly squares.

Actually, now that I think about it, in IE you should already have some of the languages installed. To view Japanese characters go to a page that has the boxes and then click on view=>encoding=>more and there are several different selections for Japanese, try selecting the different versions until you find the one that shows the characters correctly. In skype apparently there's an option to install east asian language packs in Control Panel => Region & Language Settings. I don't have skype installed to check that, but it's supposed to be there.

I use Google Chrome not Internet Explorer.

Also, I have something similar in Chrome; I told it to automatically choose how to encode a page (Tools > Encoding), and right now it chose Western (ISO-8859-1).

Even if you set the encoding to Japanese, you will still see English text in English. Try it out, here's a page where you can test it, it has a pic of Japanese text and then you test the different encodings to see which one matches in the box next to it. You'll also see that English stays English. - Internet Explorer Japanese | Display Japanese characters in Internet Explorer

I followed the steps for installing eastern langauges and stuff through the control panel, and it kept telling me I needed to insert a Windows XP disc or whatever, since I don't have it (at least I don't know where it is), I couldn't go any further, and then it started copying all this stuff to the WINDOWS/IME directory or whatever it's called.

The IME folder is for input methods which allows you to type in the different languages. I would assume that's where it would install the language files too.

Yeah.

Can you give me an example of a web page that does it Mike? With that I can use the page source to find out what font it is you need to install to get it to display properly.

I currently don't know of any; I don't run into this problem a lot, but when I do, it's quite annoying. I'll post back here when I find somewhere that has the squares.