That's true, it is always a good word:) But, in my defenсe, see: 1. I was looking for the most efficient way of changing the setting I needed, and "Specify character settings at MySQL configuration time" seemed the best to me, for it changes it once and forever, not every time I run the server. Maybe I was wrong. And anyway, I didn't know how to do that. 2. I found the file name "my.ini" on that page only once, in comments, and never found the path "UniServer\usr\local\mysql". Probably I'm supposed to know that by default but I do not yet, sorry. 3. Even if what Ric recommended wasn't exactly what I was looking for (I guess it was "Specify character settings at server startup"), it still helped, and if Ric - the developer - recommends something, it leaves no doubt that's the right way. 4. Weak exculpation, but I'm Russian speaking, and even cursory inspection of that page was already quite a challenge for me, and even writing this post took me about half an hour:) But thank you anyway for your time and trying to help, I appreciate that a lot! And in the future I will do my best to extract information from TFMs:)