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Essentially, the unit of measurement used by Microsoft Windows XP 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 XP (refer here for instructions using Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista):

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 window that you can see in Figure 2. In this window, select Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options (highlighted in red in Figure 2).
   
   
   Figure 2: Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options selected in Control Panel
   
   
3. From the resultant window, click on Regional and Language Options icon as shown in Figure 3 (highlighted in red).
   
   
   Figure 3: Regional and Language Options icon
   
   
4. This opens the multi-tabed Regional and Language Options dialog box that you can see in Figure 4. In this dialog box make sure that the Regional Options tab is selected and click the Customize.. button (highlighted in red in Figure 4).
   
   
   Figure 4: Customize button selected within Regional and Language Options dialog box
   
   
5. This brings up the Customize Regional Options, another 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 changes.

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