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Essentially, the unit of measurement used by Microsoft Windows Vista is determined by settings in place within the Regional Settings applet within the Control Panel -- choices available are U.S. and Metric -- in this tutorial, I'll show you how you can change the units from U.S. to Metric, or vice versa.

Follow these steps to change the unit of measurement in Windows Vista (refer here for instructions using Windows 7 and Windows XP): :

1. Close all open applications. Click the Start button and then click Control Panel as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Control Panel selected
   
   
2. This opens the Control Panel that you can see in Figure 2. In this window, select the Clock, Language, and Region option (highlighted in red in Figure 2).
   
   
   Figure 2: Clock, Language and Region option selected in Control Panel
   
   
3. From the resultant window, within the Regional and Language Options section choose Change the date, time, or number format option as shown in Figure 3 (highlighted in red).
   
   
   Figure 3: Regional and Language Options
   
   
4. This opens the Regional and Language Options dialog box that you can see in Figure 4. In this dialog box click the Customize this format... button (highlighted in red in Figure 4).
   
   
   Figure 4: Customize format button selected within Regional and Language Options dialog box
   
   
5. This brings up the Customize Regional Option multi-tabbed dialog box (see Figure 5) – make sure that you are on the Numbers tab. Locate the Measurement system option, click it, and choose Metric (or U.S.) from the resultant drop-down list.
   
   
   Figure 5: Metric measurement system selected within Customize Regional Options dialog box
   
   
6. Click OK to apply the change.

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