How come other computers can do £’s and mine can’t? All I get is #

It must be really annoying if your computer doesn’t do £ signs and you live in the UK. And it’s also frustrating when the @ symbol is in the wrong place.

If you’re having this problem it’s because the language settings on your computer are set to ‘English-US’ rather than ‘English-UK’. This is easily fixed.

There must be a lot of you out there because, from our web statistics, I can see that over 80% of our visitors come from the UK, but less than 10% of our visitors have ‘English-UK’ configured as the preferred language!

Here’s how to change the language setting.

Changing the language setting

Click on ‘Start’ and select ‘Control Panel’.

From the pop-up window select ‘Date, Time, Language and Regional Options’.

Note: If you are using Windows XP and the pop-up window does not look like the one above, click “Switch to Category View” in the box at the top left, labelled “Control Panel” to follow the next pictures.

If you are using Windows 98 find the icon that looks like a globe, labelled “Regional and Language Options” - this will take you straight to the last screenshot.

I haven’t got Vista, so can’t give you a screenshot, although the steps will be similar.

Select “Change Numbers, Dates and Times”
or “Regional and Language Options”.

Change the language to “English United Kingdom” from the drop down menu.

Job done!