[Solved] Keyboard Issues on Windows 7

[Patrick1991]

Hello,

on my Windows 7 VirtualBox, I cannot use the @-sign and every other key that is accessible by holding "option" on the MacBook Pro keyboard. How do I fix that issue?

[andyp73]

I'm going to ask what is probably the dumbest question ever... what does happen when you try to use those keys? Anything? Nothing? The wrong thing?

-Andy.

[Patrick1991]

Hello,

nothing.

[mpack]

Please post a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click and "Show Log" in the GUI, save "VBox.log" (no other file) to a zip, and attach the zip here.

[andyp73]

I have a 2017 iMac with a USB magic keyboard. Looking at my Windows 7 VM the € and # didn't display with the default "United Kingdom" keyboard. I ended up downloading Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and a keyboard layout file I found on the internet for a MacBook of some description to which I made a couple more customisations as the magic keyboard is slightly different. This link has links to Apple German, Apple Swedish and Apple UK English layout files.

Keyboard Layout Creator then packages it up and spits out an installer that you can run which gives you the new keyboard as an option under Control Panel -> Region and Language.

On the magic keyboard, the option key used for getting € and # seems to map into Windows as "Alt" but I could never get Keyboard Layout Creator to work with that so in Windows they are mapped using Control+Option on the keyboard.

-Andy.

[Patrick1991]

Whey! It worked!

[mpack]

Hi Andy, that's great research.

Could you possible repeat that in a new topic which I will then move to the Windows Guests tutorials area?

I would suggest a topic title such as "Tutorial: Adding Apple (and other) Keyboard Layouts to Windows".

If you know then it would also be useful to have a guide as to which versions of Windows this applies to. Presumably it's at least from Win7 onwards.

[socratis]

According to the System Requirements in the page that Andy linked to (emphasis mine):

Supported Operating System

Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 2

• .NET Framework 2.0

Funny thing though, I had never had to do anything close to that....

Andy, can you link to a picture of your physical keyboard layout? Mine looks like the English in Apple support's How to identify keyboard localizations.

[mpack]

The OP seems to be saying that it works with Win7 too, implying that the system requirements info is incomplete on that web page. Probably never updated. It makes sense to me that a data structure for mapping scan codes to key codes shouldn't need to be very different now than it was in 2003.

[Patrick1991]

Windows 7 here, it works. Could not be happier.

[socratis]

Whey! It worked!

Great! Marking this as [Solved].

Could you possible repeat that in a new topic which I will then move to the Windows Guests tutorials area?

"mpack" asked, "andyp73" obliged...
New tutorial located in:

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      • Tutorial: Adding Apple (and other) Keyboard Layouts to Windows Guests