Typing international characters on a US keyboard

I often need to log-in on machines all over the world using RAdmin, and those machines all have a US keyboard layout.  My laptop has a Belgian keyboard layout (azerty), but for easier access to those remote machines, I connected an external keyboard with a US keyboard layout.

This makes life much easier... unless I have to write French or Dutch words which are full of accents (grave accent, acute accent, circomflex, tréma, ...).

The easiest way to type these special characters on a US keyboard is to install the "International" keyboard layout instead of (or beside) the "US" keyboard.  You can do this by going to the keyboard layout settings in the Control Panel:  (instructions are for Windows 7, but it is very similar on other versions)

• Go to the "Control Panel", follow the link "Clock, Language, and Region", and click "Change keyboards".
• Click the "Change keyboards" button.  You get a list of languages, with for each language the installed keyboards and other input services.
• Click the "Add" button
• Locate the tree item: "English (United States)" => Keyboard => "United States-International"

After enabling the International keyboard, you can type a "ë", simply by typing a double quote first (which doesn't do anything), and type a regular "e" afterwards.

One drawback of the International keyboard layout, is that you cannot type regulare single or double quotes anymore using one keystroke.  You need to press the double quote first, followed by e.g. a space.  This can be a burden when you have to type text with many single and/or double quotes like programming languages (C++, C#, Java, ...).  That's why I keep both keyboard layouts (US and International) installed.

When you install both keyboard layouts, you can easily switch between them using the "Language bar" that you can add by richt clicking on the taskbar, opening the "Toolbars" submenu and enabling the "Language bar" menu item: