This is not necessarily the fault of HP but buying the laptop with an unsuitable keyboard layout. Which one does your HP laptop have, Mr Red? They should be available in different flavours. The English and American keyboard layout usually have |\[]{} and are well suited for programming but the German layout, for example, omits these characters to make room for the umlaut characters. Our administrative staff therefore prefers the Geman keyboard layout and our development staff the American variant.