Default virtual machine NumLock state

Tuesday, 28 March 2006 by Michel Roth

Depending on whether you�re an �numlock� on or a �numlock off� person, this article could be useful to set numlock on or off in Virtual PC.

"One of the problems that we faced when working on Virtual PC was whether to create virtual machines which had NumLock on by default, or off by default. This may sound like a small issue - but people tend to have near religious preferences for the state of NumLock on their systems (e.g. I am a 'NumLock off' person - and my wife is a 'NumLock on' person. We both get frustrated when we try to use the other persons computer and find that the NumLock state is not what we expected).

With Virtual PC - the way we handle this is we check the state of the NumLock key when you power on a virtual machine for the first time ever - and set that as the default for the virtual machine. If you want to change this value for a given virtual machine - you should hit 'Del' to get into the virtual machine BIOS while booting, and then go to the 'Boot Settings Configuration' section of the 'Advanced' settings page."

Read the article here.