Accented characters on your UK keyboard under Windows XP

It's bothered me for ages that it is simply not possible to type most accented characters (other than acute accents) on a standard UK keyboard, under Windows XP. There were very few available: basically, if you press and hold AltGr whilst pressing a,e,i,o or u, you'll get the acute-accent versions of those characters. And that's it.

OK, I'm clearly slow on the uptake, because there is a way, it's just that Microsoft hides it rather well. Here's how to do it.

1. Firstly, go into your Control Panel and select "Regional and Language Options". (You thought it would be "Keyboard", didn't you? So did I.)
   
2. Click on the "Languages" tab. Under "Text services and input languages", click on the "Details..." button. (Told you it wasn't obvious!)
   
3. In the box centre-left, you'll see "English (United Kingdom)", and the keyboard option for that will be "United Kingdom". Click on "Keyboard" and click the "Add..." button to the right.
   
4. That should pop up a new dialog box entitled, "Add Input Language". The "Input language" option selected should be "English (United Kingdom)". Everything else apart from the "Keyboard layout/IME" checkbox should be greyed-out. Click in that checkbox. That should wake up the keyboard layout drop-down.
   
5. Click on the drop-down and select "United Kingdom Extended". Now click OK. That should put "United Kingdom Extended" into your "Installed services" list.
   
6. "OK" your way out of the other dialogs, until you're back to normal service.]
   
7. In your taskbar, usually at the bottom of your screen, you should see "UK" followed by a keyboard symbol. Click on the keyboard symbol. That should offer you a choice of "United Kingdom" and "United Kingdom Extended". Select the extended one.
   

That's the heavy lifting done. Now, when you want to type an accented character, it's easy. You can still get the acute-accented characters as before. But now you can have the other accents too. To understand how to generate the accents, you need to understand how "dead keys" work. A dead key is a key that doesn't show anything when pressed, but modifies the next key you press. Here is a list of the new dead keys that the UK Extended keyboard introduces. Where it says "AltGR + (some key)" it means "Press and hold AltGr whilst pressing (some key), then release both":

Dead key	Means	Affects
AltGr+apostrophe (')	Acute accent	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
AltGr+2	Umlaut / diaresis ('"' looks a little like an umlaut)	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
AltGr+6	Circumflex (see '^' above '6')	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
Backquote (`)	Grave accent	a e i o u w y A E I O U W Y
AltGr+#	Tilde	a n o A N O

Note that if you want to type a backquote on its own, you press the space-bar afterwards. In addition to these, if you want to type a Spanish/Portuguese cedilla-c, you type AltGr-c or AltGr-C depending on whether you want lower-case or upper-case. These are the only accented characters you can type using the United Kingdom Extended keyboard. If you want access to more, use a US-layout keyboard, and select the "United States International" option in the same way as above. To get a feel for how US International layout works, go to http://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/goglobal/keyboards/kbdusx.htm - hover your cursor over the grave (`) and acute (') dead keys, and the AltGr key, to see which characters can be generated.