Does your Surface think it’s in a different country (and how to fix it)?

I’m located in Australia, yet when I first started up my Microsoft Surface I noticed that some of the standard apps had a definite United Kingdom flavour to them. My Bing News was all UK based and all the prices in the Windows App Store were shown in GBP.

I had a look through the Change PC Settings available from the settings charm menu but all you can change in there is the Time Zone (which was correctly showing Sydney, Australia).

Changing the location of the Microsoft Surface ended up being quite simple (yet not very intuitive or easy to find). Here’s how it’s done.

Swipe in from the right edge of the screen to bring in the charms menu and select the search charm. Then type “change location” and select “Settings” under the search input box. You should then see the “Change Location” icon and text on the left side of the screen – select this.

Now you get a simple Region | Location dialog that allows you to change your Home Location. For me I simply changed it over from United Kingdom to Australia.