The keystroke  right-hand-side Alt plus letter E does not work with standard
qwerty keyboard layout, but it works for instance with the German qwertz
keyboard layout.
To my knoledge, the procedure with 'hold Alt and press 0128 on the
numpad' is the only universal procedure on Windows.
If you don't have a physical numpad, then usually pressing the Fn key
allows you to turn your laptop keyboard layout into a numpad, where
letter j corresponds to numpad 1, letter k to numpad 2, letter l to
numpad 3, letter u to numpad 4, letter i to numpad 5, letter o to numpad
6, number 7 to numpad 7, number 8 to numpad 8, number 9 to numpad 9, and
letter m to numpad 0.
Another alternative should be to use the international US keyboard
layout. But there I don"t know any details myself.
Best regards and a happy new year, Marti

--
Martin Wiemer

Grabensprung 185
12683 Berlin
Germany

Tel.: +49 178 715 66 76