Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Why is my keyboard changing to another languages?



On my business laptop and home desktop machine, both installed with Windows 7 64 bits, I have 2 keyboard languages installed. I have no idea why. I have English and Dutch. I only uses English but sometimes it switches during typing of a letter to Dutch. This is very annoying. I had no idea why, but today I discovered that a short cut is responsible for it.
The short cut ALT+SHIFT. For my all Windows short cuts are nice if you are aware of it. I think that most poeple are not aware of all short cuts of Windows 7, which can result in a negative user experience. If you really need to have more than one keyboard layout, you can use the ALT+SHIFT combination to change it back. If you only need one keyboard language you can remove the other keyboard layouts via:

Start, Control Panel, Clock Language and Region, Change keyboard or other input methods.
Tab Keyboards and Languages, press Change keyboards.
Now you can remove all keyboards you do not want to use.

Happy typing without the big suprise of a changed keyboard language.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You should have asked my girlfriend! Not a gel, but she does understand the various keyboards and how to switch between them. There are actually people that use more than one language.

Ronald Voets said...

Thanks, very useful. I have been annoyed by this "feature" several times already