Trouble entering letter with horizontal line through it

August 17, 2024 2:05 PM

Hi. I need to know how to enter a "W" with a horizontal line through it, preferably using an ALT code or something like that since copying and pasting won't be an option. The reason for this is I'm trying to bypass a very frustrating initial setup process for a new laptop I got, and the customer service guy I chatted with online (not on the new laptop, but on one I've owned for a few years) told me to press the Shift key + F10, which I did, and then to enter a code which included the aforementioned W with a horizontal line through it. He couldn't give me simple, coherent instructions for how to enter it, and my attempts to look it up online have been fruitless. I hope this all makes sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
posted by DavidfromBA to Computers & Internet (20 answers total)

This may be obvious but what model of laptop is it? I feel like we're missing something here.
posted by Alensin at 2:11 PM on August 17

That character isn't in any of the Unicode Latin Extended sets. You need better advice.
posted by zadcat at 2:21 PM on August 17 [3 favorites]

It's not the Welsh letter Ŵ, is it?
posted by scruss at 2:25 PM on August 17 [1 favorite]

Like this? ￦

Fullwidth Won sign U+FFE6
posted by coffeepot at 2:32 PM on August 17 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: @Alensin: LG Gram 17" Laptop Intel Evo 13th Gen. Intel core i7 1360P 16GB RAM - 1TB SSD, Model number 17Z90R-H.AAY8U1
@scruss: No, definitely a W with a horizontal line running through it.
@zadcat: Trust me, I know. My heart sank when he gave me a code with something weird like that.
posted by DavidfromBA at 2:33 PM on August 17

Response by poster: @coffeepot No, with just one line, not two.
posted by DavidfromBA at 2:34 PM on August 17

Response by poster: A little backstory: The initial setup for the new laptop doesn't let me bypass going through Microsoft accounts. Every email address, cell number and password seems to have issues, it keeps telling me that I already have a Microsoft account for that number (my cell phone #), and nothing I've tried to reset it or use something else seems to work. In the meantime, I can't even get online or do anything with the new laptop for that reason: I'm stuck in the initial setup process from hell, and the customer service agent was less than extremely helpful to put it *VERY* politely. I really want to avoid having to return it but if this continues I won't have much choice.
posted by DavidfromBA at 2:38 PM on August 17

It sounds like you are (inadvertently?) trying to create a new Microsoft account instead of sign into an existing one. I would look into the setup screens, there should definitely be a awy to just sign in.
posted by Alensin at 2:41 PM on August 17 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: @Alensin I've successfully set up two computers before: a Mac in 2009, and my current laptop (an HP) around 2020 or 2021. I was able to bypass any tedious setup process and just start using it. You would think that with valid Gmail + Yahoo addresses and a cell phone, that would be enough. But apparently not. I don't actually want to create a new Microsoft account, and would love nothing more than to just bypass that whole process but I'm stuck, and this is the code the guy gave me: OOBEWBYPASNRO. Except that, again, the W has a line through it. Sorry if I'm rambling here, hopefully all of this can help.
posted by DavidfromBA at 2:45 PM on August 17

OK firstly we need to know what operating system this laptop is running?
Then which of the many unicode characters with a strikethrough they are looking for.

The full width Won sign does appear with a single line for me, but that's likely an artefact of the font stack that's being used on my machine.

If this is Windows and you just want to bypass the Microsoft account nonesense, then follow the instructions here, no need for any unicode wrangling.
posted by Lanark at 2:45 PM on August 17 [1 favorite]

The command you are looking for is
OOBE\BYPASSNRO
posted by Lanark at 2:46 PM on August 17 [10 favorites]

Response by poster: @Lanark that does indeed seem to be it. If he'd told me that, rather than the same thing with that [censored expletive] "W with a line through it" where the backslash is, I'd have avoided wasting a lot of time. Unfortunately however, although it initially seemed promising, it just brought me right back to the "Sign in with your Microsoft account and create the experience you want" page. So... yeah...
posted by DavidfromBA at 2:57 PM on August 17

You say you were chatting with the customer service guy online, it sounds he's cut-n-pasting something garbled that he himself doesn't understand. I would have guessed the backslash was being interpreted as an escape character except it didn't consume the B that immediately follows. But Lanark has the correct instructions, I'd bet on that rather than this comically inept support line.
posted by axiom at 2:57 PM on August 17 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Just realized that there are still quite a few steps that I need to do on that link Lanark provided. I'm going to have to give it another go later; right now my brain is fried and the neighbors are playing loud music. In the meantime, THANK YOU SO MUCH everyone for your help and patience. Again, will return to this later.
posted by DavidfromBA at 3:01 PM on August 17 [2 favorites]

If you can't get them to work, have you considered creating say a free Gmail account to obtain a brand new email address and just registering a Microsoft account against that email? And I haven't created a MS account ever, but is a phone number required?
posted by axiom at 3:01 PM on August 17 [1 favorite]

The Yen and/or Won symbol being transposed with backslash is a form of mojibake, i.e. a common encoding error. It dates back to 8-bit encodings, where the Korean and Japanese character maps replaced backslash with those symbols. More detail here but you can find countless examples of it happening if you google something like "backslash yen replace".

These kind of pre-unicode encoding shenanigans should be a thing of the past but sadly they are not. A lot of Windows applications still accept and/or produce the so-called "ANSI" output instead of Unicode, for god knows what reason. But sometimes that pollutes the clipboard as things are copied over, and in the case of encoding ambiguity the result is almost always some kind of mojibake and garbled text, like we have here.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:30 PM on August 17 [10 favorites]

[And I meant to point out that calling it ANSI in scare quotes is meant to convey that it's a really stupid label for what in reality is a whole bunch of much older character encoding standards, which were derived from the "code page" system of IBM PC-DOS to deal with the issue of being able to sell computers globally. But that gets condensed down to 'ANSI' often, but that implies its one thing; it's a stew of who knows what. It's what Unicode was supposed to fix.]
posted by Rhomboid at 3:34 PM on August 17 [2 favorites]

The Microsoft Answers page about using OOBE\BYPASSNRO to bypass network setup says this may may not work on later versions. There is another workaround posted in the comments by a volunteer moderator, Johnny55, that may work. (It's a little later down the page) It involves manually adding a user, rebooting, and selecting the local user you added. Maybe try this if the above fails.

It's a little scary that setting up a laptop should involve looking up workarounds to workarounds and crowdsourcing answers to decode what customer support said. Hopefully your patience will be rewarded.
posted by Avelwood at 3:45 PM on August 17 [3 favorites]

I believe the easiest way to bypass the Microsoft account BS currently is to use an email address like [e-mail]. It will fail when you enter a password and then let you create a local account.
posted by wierdo at 3:50 PM on August 17 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH. The short version: I finally managed to navigate through the setup process, and can now finally start using that laptop. (Or rather, my mom can finally start using my birthday present.) A big thank you once again to all of you!
posted by DavidfromBA at 6:45 PM on August 17 [7 favorites]