Many people travel overseas for work and end up having to buy a new laptop. Of course, if you bought a laptop outside of Europe, it is likely that the keyboard come up with a layout you’re not used to, but don’t worry because there are ways to change keys so you can have them Spanishand we’ll tell you how.
Regardless of the type and layout of the keyboard you have, under the Windows operating system it is very easy to change the keyboard layout through software, so you will always be able to have it in Spanish from the Europe (or whichever language you prefer) regardless of whether the keys don’t match (so, for example, you can have the eñe key). But here we are not going to go into the behavior of the keyboard but rather into its physical layout.
Attention: ¿ANSI or ISO keyboard?
Of course, first of all, you should keep in mind that in addition to the keyboard layout (e.g. es_ES for Spanish), you can also (usually) encounter two different key layouts: ANSI ( acronym of American National Standards Institute) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization), and the position and number of keys are different; You will be able to see it clearly in the following image.
As you can see, the ISO distribution (which is the one we usually use in Europe) has more keys (the eñe key and the major and minor key next to the left Shift key) and the oversized ENTER key, even s ‘it is true that on laptop computers we often find it with the same size as in the ANSI distribution simply to save space.
With this, what we want to tell you is that if you have purchased a laptop whose keyboard is in ANSI format, even if you can configure one of its keys as eñe, its position will be different. However, there are options so you can change the language of the keys and use them as if it were a keyboard in Spanish, so let’s see.
How to Change Laptop Keys to Spanish
The first option is the easiest and cheapest, which is to buy a set of stickers to literally stick on top of the keys your keyboard already has. This way when you look at the keyboard you will be able to see the keys with exactly the configuration that you have in the software (and in this case the intention is to put the keys on the laptop in Spanish from Europe ).
It is a solution that can be useful for most users, although you must bear in mind that after all you put simple stickers and they do not have the same resistance as the keys, so with time and use, they may eventually wear out and/or peel off. At least they are very cheap.
The second option you have is whether your keyboard manufacturer sells spare parts of this one, although this solution is a little more expensive (they can be between 15 and 30 dollars) and involves having to disassemble your laptop to remove a keyboard and put in another. Of course, it’s the best thing in the end, because you will literally change the keyboard of the laptop, although it involves a certain risk of having to disassemble the equipment, as well as difficulties in finding the spare part of origin.
Finally, another option is to modify only the keys you want to modify, such as the Ñ. This would involve taking apart the keyboard key (which is usually a scissor mechanism, be very careful as it’s very easy to break trying to remove the key), and finding the key(s) you wish to change that are compatible with capital letters on your laptop keyboard. It is not an easy task, of course.
Without a doubt, the easiest and cheapest option is to buy the stickers, but it’s up to you how you want to do it so that your keyboard has the keys in Spanish.
