It's a pain in the derriere. Keyboard mappings won't be right without using a proper keyboard driver, keys you expect will be in the wrong place and typing is difficult, if it's a japan only model certain drivers/software may not be available in English and the Japanese drivers may not work with English XP.... Dynamism does a great job of converting Japanese units to English but even then usability suffers. Trying to do it by yourself? Been there, done that... it is NOT easy.