A common cause of failure of the Alt-NumPad method of entering character codes is failing to turn on NumLock. The Number Pad, which must be used to input the character numbers, must be turned on.

My newest PC came with a "Microsoft Business" keyboard that gave me some initial problems similar to what you described. The difficulty I had was that this magic keyboard has 12 extra "shortcut" buttons, and a scroll roller built in. It defaults on in "business mode" and all of the standard "F keys" have different "shortcut" functions. In the default mode, nothing works as expected.

There is a key in the added top row labelled "F Lock" and pressing this key turns the keyboard into a standard PC keyboard where things work more or less normally.

If your new keyboard has multiple labels (usually top and front of each key) on many keys, you may have something similar. If this is the problem, there should be a way to "change modes" to get a reasonably useful keyboard.

The "correct form" for Alt-NumPad input of character codes always begins with a leading zero. On many keyboards/systems you can get by with leaving off the zero, but yours may be one that requires it.

I suspect that the problem here is that NumLock isn't turned on, but if you got a "fancy keyboard" you may need to figure out how to "turn off the fancy stuff."

John