One of my colleagues asked me about enabling Numlock upon booting but after looking through their BIOS it seems the option was unavailable, however there is a way to enable this setting when Windows XP starts up, however it involves editing the registry – only do this if you are comfortable with editing the registry.

For this we need to update the Default account used prior to a user logging on. This can be found under HKEY_USERS->.DEFAULT->Control Panel->Keyboard

The particular entry we need to edit is InitialKeyboardIndicators – you can see the image above it is set to the value zero (Numlock Off), edit this value and set it to the value 2 to indicate Numlock on.

You can also set the value for the current user if you navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER->Control Panel->Keyboard