How do I disable "alt 4"?

[John Steedman]

When I draft emails in another language, e.g. French or German, I gain access to the ASCII extended character set using the "alt" key ("fin alt" in the case of my laptop). This is normally o.k., e.g. é is "alt 130" and ü is "alt 129". However, ö is "alt 148" and Ü is "alt 154". When I try to compose these characters which involve combining "alt" with the number 4 (other than copying-and-pasting them from Notepad, which is laborious), I get immediately booted out of the Hotmail "new message" window and into the "Deleted" folder, thereby losing the whole of my draft, so that I have to start drafting all over again. A friend managed to solve the problem on my PC, which has Windows XP, but how do I deal with this matter on my laptop, which has Windows 7?

 

[TrainableMan]

It seems alt+4 is a keystroke combination defined to the outlook.com site because I was able to duplicate your problem there, but only there. If there isn't an option on outlook.com to redefine key shortcuts (and I couldn't find one) then the only thing I could think of is changing the keyboard configuration such as disabling that key combination. On your XP machine what happens when you use alt+4; does it do nothing or does it do what alt+4 does everywhere else but outlook.com?

 

[John Steedman]

Many thanks for your prompt reply. I'm using my XP machine now. When I use alt+4 in Outlook.com on my XP machine, it does what I expect it to do, and indeed what it does here, i.e. alt+4 is . alt+148 is ö and alt+154 is Ü.

 

[TrainableMan]

Then unfortunately I have no idea. The only thing I could think of is a way to block the use of alt+4 so it does nothing. I don't know how your friend made it work on outlook.com because save to draft & close seems to be what that key combo does for me.

Maybe someone else will have an idea ... or ask your friend if he remembers what he did on your XP machine.