DVD regions

Does anyone happen to know if the regional settings on a laptop are built in to the software or the hardware? I’d like to watch the 8-million awesome movies that are stocked in the Sussex library, but I don’t want to end up setting my laptop DVD settings to region 2.

I also have some American DVD’s with me, so switching it once won’t really work—I need to know if I can simply set, say, Windows Media Player to region 2 and leave PowerDVD on region 1.