Ask Owen

I seem to have broken my keyboard. When I press SHIFT-2, instead of the quotation marks I get an “@” symbol and when I press “@” I get quotation marks. How can I fix it?

This problem is caused by having the wrong layout selected for your keyboard. British layouts have quotation marks appear when you press SHIFT-2, while American keyboards have an “@” symbol. It’s actually quite easy to switch it back to what it’s supposed to be, so here’s what you do.

Click on the Start button and find your way to the Control Panel. Click on Regional and Language settings and select the Keyboards and Languages tab. You’ll find a button there that says “Change Keyboards”. Here’s what you’ll see:

If the keyboard layout you want isn’t shown on screen, click the Add button. Click on the small plus next to the langauge you want and then the one next to Keyboard. Click in the box you want and then on OK. It will appear in the Installed Services section and you can then select it in the Default input language menu.

It sounds more complicated than it actually is, but once you’ve actually done it, it’s actually quite simple. Let me know if you still have problems.

Related Questions

• Why is my cursor jumping from one place to another?
  My wife's laptop has a strange problem. While typing in a Word document or an email the cursor seems to jump from away from where it's suppose to be, which makes a major mess of the document. What can...
• What are the keys labelled F1 through F12 on my keyboard?
  Every computer I've had has these F keys at the top of the keyboard. What are these and what are they used for? Commonly known as "function keys", F1 through F12 may have a variety of different use...
• How can I make Captchas easier to guess?
  I'm having problems filling in CAPTCHAs on forms. Is there anything you can recommend to make it easier? The scrambled letters used in Captcha security boxes are sometimes rather difficult to read....