wifey has cocked up her laptop keyboard

[chunkolini]

Help.
Wifey has suddenly had the laptop keyboard start giving the wrong letters per key pressed.
I did this to mine years back and it drove me mad. I think there is a simple command to set it right again.
you have ten minutes to sort us out.
Cheers Chunko'.

 

[Tiggy_dorset]

Language setting wrong? set to Kazakstan or something?

 

[chunkolini]

Nooo
I think it is something to with american english or keyboard or something.
3 minutes and counting

 

[Tiggy_dorset]

havn't used windows in an age, but should be in Control Panel, then keybourd settings...somewhere, if it is the problem, that is.

 

[Tiggy_dorset]

Nooo
I think it is something to with american english or keyboard or something.
3 minutes and counting

probably can change that in the same place, i reckon.

 

[Tiggy_dorset]

should be 'British keyboard layout' not American

 

[brightspark]

should be 'British keyboard layout' not American

qwerty

 

[chunkolini]

Mrs C has had a go and is restarting.
10 minutes is up.

 

[chunkolini]

Ten minutes it was.
Sorted. That showed her.
I think it is caused by one of those moments of accidentally catching an extra key.
Nice one Tiggy Dorset.
BUT the qwerty keyboard is a worldwide standard. That's silly.
I have distant memories of resetting computers in my old workplace like this to annoy the right people.
Cheers, Chunko'.

 

[Eastblock]

I have a laptop that I bought in Germany. They have "y" and "z" swapped around compared to a UK keyboard. I used to have a Russian jeep - a Gaz 69. One day I wanted to search for images on Google and show a colleague what a Gaz 69 looks like. You guessed it: because of the swapped keys and forgetting what language setting I was using I ended up searching for "gay 69" images. My colleague was not impressed!

 

[Tiggy_dorset]

Oooh do I win a prize?

Glad you got it sorted.

 

[Tiggy_dorset]

I always know when I have the American setting, the " and @ are always swapped.

 

[wheresmejumper]

I always know when I have the American setting, the " and @ are always swapped.

thank you!

i have been battling this problem with months.also has no euro or pound symbol.
at least i know now

 

[ibrooks]

I think it is caused by one of those moments of accidentally catching an extra key.

BUT the qwerty keyboard is a worldwide standard.

Left Alt and Shift is the common "hotkey" to switch between languages. You'll probably see EN somewhere on the taskbar telling you which keyboard layout you are using - unfortunately it doesn't differentiate between ENglish (United States) and ENglish (United Kingdom). Personally I tend to remove all but English (United Kingdom) so that even accidentally catching the key combo to switch input languages does nothing.

QWERTY is not an international standard. There are quite a few different layouts just amongst the countries that use the same alphabet as us and it's not just the symbols that move around or disappear. One of the customers we used to support was Scapa tapes and I'd quite often come across people with Swiss-German keyboard layouts. Not sure off the top of my head nowadays which letter keys were different but I had to be careful what keys I was actually pressing on their keyboards when doing any work on their machines. Worst one I came across was where a Swiss laptop had gone dud and the hard-disk had just been swapped to a spare UK laptop so what was printed on the keys was not necessarily what came up on the screen. The lady was a touch typist so she got along quite well without looking at the keyboard.

We were once shipped a hundred or so desktop PC's from HP and they came with Canadian keyboards. The project had a deliverable milestone of x PC's deployed by such-a-date and HP weren't going to have the replacement keyboards with us by then so we had to install the machines on the desks and then revisit a couple of weeks later to swap the keyboards.

Iain

 

[chunkolini]

Tiggy dorset,
I knew you could do it. You have won the prize.
Wheresmejumper you owe Tiggy The Prize.
Ibrooks, this a bonkers one, how does this happen accidentally? is it a case of accidentally brush two keys at once to make the weird command.
I admit it is funny to do it to the cocky so and so's computer at work.

Big thanks from Mrs and Mr Chunkolini.

 

[the snooper]

chunko sometimes windows has the language tool on the taskbar near the clock could it have been clicked accidently

 

[zx9]

I had to borrow a second lap top from the BMS engineer on site in Belgium, to run emulations of our control system. It had a AZERTY keyboard, a right pain, not helped by the lighting channels been called in French

 

[ibrooks]

Ibrooks, this a bonkers one, how does this happen accidentally? is it a case of accidentally brush two keys at once to make the weird command.

The operating system can have more than one keyboard layout loaded. Usually US is loaded by default (coz Microsoft assume everyone is American) and you'll add UK if you are building a machine that'll have a UK keyboard. If you don't remove the US then from that point on you can switch between the two so yes accidentally catching the left hand Alt button and the shift key at the same time (assuming that's the hotkey on your machine) will switch it from one to the other.

If you're not planning to connect a Yankee keyboard at any time then I'd go into the regional and language settings and remove the US keyboard so that you can't do it again by accident.

Iain