I'm not sure what you want to type. Emails? With Mac OS X, I use my Mac keyboard Spanish characters for emails in Firefox. But if I want to send something longer, I compose in Open Office Writer, do all my editing, the copy and paste into my email window. With Windows, typing special characters is a pain. But that's not the only reason that people migrate to other OSs. Does this help? Or are you doing something other than emails?

Hi,

adopt the following method: Press "start"

       "All Programs"
       "Accessories"
       "System Tools"
       "Character Map"

From the character map, select all the letters of interest. Paste these into an email (possibly as its title) and then save the email as a draft.

 When next writing an email which needs an accented character, all that is necessary is to copy and paste from the above saved draft (title) into the email being typed.  A little time consuming to set-up but quick and easy to use thereafter.

Regards Deepak Krishnan P.R

Install the US International keyboard layout and switch to that layout if you need to type accented letters.
That layout supports dead keys and easily allows to enter accented characters.
It is usually better to assign a specific key to select a layout and disable the shortcut to cycle to avoid an unintentional layout switch if you use a Shift + Ctrl/Alt shortcut in Firefox.

See How to use the United States-International keyboard layout in Windows 7, in Windows Vista, and in Windows XP

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560

• http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/The-Language-bar-overview The Language bar (overview)