Why is my UK keyboard typing different symbols to those shown?

Q  I have a desktop PC running Windows 7. With this, I use an old Samsung wireless keyboard. This has always performed faultlessly, but the supplied driver doesn’t seem to work with Windows 7.

I recently tried to set up another user account for my wife, but although the keyboard is set to UK English, the ‘@’ key produces a double quotation mark (“) symbol. The keyboard works normally with my user account. Can you help?
Derek Peters

A  This is a common problem that happens because the keyboard is set to the wrong language in Windows’ settings. Keyboards for use in different countries have slightly different layouts.

In the UK, for example, the double quotation mark is typed by pressing Shift + 2, while on a US-layout keyboard, this produces the @ symbol instead (the double quotation mark is typed by pressing Shift and ’; the @ symbol being above the latter key). Regardless, it is an easy problem to fix.

Click Start, followed by Control Panel, and click the ‘Change keyboard or other input methods’ link under the ‘Clock, Language, and Region’ heading. When the dialogue box opens, click the ‘Change keyboards’ button on the Keyboards and Languages tab – this opens the ‘Text Services and Input Languages’ dialogue box.

On the General tab, click the Add button and, in the ‘Add Input Language’ dialogue box, look for ‘English (United Kingdom)’. Click the plus (‘+’) sign next to it to expand this section, then the one next to Keyboard inside it and click to tick the United Kingdom box.

Click the OK button and the United Kingdom keyboard will be added to the Installed services list of the ‘Text Services and Input Languages’ dialogue box. Open the Default input language dropdown menu just above this and choose the ‘English (United Kingdom) – United Kingdom’ option.

Finally, select the ‘English (United States)’ entry under Installed services and click the Remove button. Your user account will now be set to use a keyboard with a UK layout.