It’s very easy to do this by accident, which is probably why so many people hit the £ sign and see a # appear instead. The double-quote (“) and ampersand keys are also swapped.įor future reference, if both UK and US layouts are available, you can swap between them by pressing left alt-shift. UK users want a pound (£) sign, which was not part of the original standard ASCII character set. UK keyboards obviously have a different layout from French and German keyboards, but the most common problems are due to the much smaller differences between UK and US settings.
If a key is producing the wrong response, check that Windows has the correct settings for your location and the language used by your keyboard. For example, if you keep hitting caps lock or F1 by mistake, you can reprogram those keys to do something else, or nothing. It certainly helps if you set things up correctly, but if that fails, there are several utilities that let you change the key assignments.
We’re used to the idea that you can plug any keyboard into any Windows PC, but not everything will work every time. The delete key does work, but adds a # every time it moves backwards. When I press the delete key, I get a hash symbol (#). I have a Microsoft Professional keyboard plugged into a Toshiba laptop running Windows 7.
