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Keyboard Problems on Upgrade to Windows Vista
April 01, 2008
Over the weekend I finally moved everything over from my old computer to my new Dell Inspiron. The move was a bit tricky, as I was moving from the XP platform to Windows Vista.
I thought I'd post about my experiences with my keyboard, in case anyone out there has also encountered this problem.
I live in Canada, so my keyboard options include a French keyboard and a multilingual keyboard layout.
My keyboard would start off with a standard layout, but as I typed, it would eventually start changing over to the French keyboard layout. I began getting accented characters instead of, for example, the "/" and "?" symbols. I tried a number of different keyboards, and tried a number of different USB ports, too, but the problem persisted.
After Googling around for quite a while and trying out all sorts of things, we finally discovered a possible reason, and a solution that worked.
Windows Vista allows you to use multiple keyboard layouts. This is accomplished via keyboard shortcuts. So if you've been finding your keyboard suddenly giving you strange characters, and you live in Canada, this might be what's happening to you.
Here's how I solved my problem - but there are no guarantees this will work for you. I am definitely NOT a Windows Vista expert. This is just what I did to fix the problem I was having, and it may not work for everyone.
I opened up the Control Panel, and then went to Regional and Language settings. I clicked on the keyboard tab. My settings were for Canada, and my keyboard options included French and multilingual layouts.
I set my keyboard shortcuts for switching between keyboards to "none".
I also removed the French and multilingual keyboard options completely, leaving only the Standard English layout, but this was probably overkill. I imagine eliminating the keyboard shortcuts for switching between keyboards will probably do the trick on their own.
I've had no problems with strange keyboard characters since I made these changes.
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Comments
I had the same problem, and that is exactly how I fixed it. It never came back. Sure was annoying... until I got annoyed enough to Google for that solution!
Posted by: Lisa | Apr 1, 2008 8:12:15 PM
Thanks ever so much for this... solved my problem too!!
Posted by: Gord | Apr 18, 2008 2:12:02 PM
