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This tutorial explains how to enable or disable Keyboard Number Lock each time your computer starts.

Have you ever entered a phone number via the numeric keypad only to discover nothing has appeared? The most likely cause is Number Lock (or Num Lock as it us usually labeled)  is disabled, and it’s a simple matter of hitting the Num Lock key to get numbers from your keypad. If you have done this enough times however, you will know how much of a pain it is to retype things repeatedly. Luckily a simple registry setting can set the Number Lock Status to your preferred setting.

To enable or disable keyboard numberlock at startup:

1. Stat regedit but going start -> run -> regedit -> OK

2. Browse to HKEY_Current_User\ControlPanel\Keyboard

3. In the right hand pane double click “InitialKeyboardIndicators” and set “Value data:” to 0 to have NumLock disabled, or 2 to have NumLock enabled at startup.

Oddly Microsoft recommends making a  visual basic script to set Number Lock. This seems a litte cumbersome compared to changing a single registry entry, but that is probably a matter of opinion.

%SystemRoot% is a system wide variable which refers to the path and folder name where system files are located. Typically this is C:\Windows, although you can designate a different drive or folder when windows is installed. you can use %SystemRoot% in place of the actual location of the folder that contains the windows system files.

For example, to identify your system root folder, click Start -> Run, type %SystemRoot% and click OK. This will open windows explorer with your system root folder displayed.

Confusingly if you go Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced tab -> Environment Variables, then scroll to the bottom of the list and double click windir you will see that %SystemRoot% is actually a “Variable value” of a variable named windir. (see image below)

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This tutorial explains how to change your windows xp product key / xp serial / xp license without using software or reinstalling. To do this you need to edit the registry to deactivate windows, then run msoobe.exe to enter your new product key.

You can download software to help you do this, but that’s for girls. Real men do it this way…

1. Run regedit and drill down to:

HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\Current Version\WPAEvents.

Select WPAEvents then on the right double click “OOBETimer” and change at least one digit of this value to deactivate windows.

2. Choose run from start menu and type this command in the run box:
%systemroot%\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe /a to get the Activate Windows wizard, select “Yes, I want to telephone a customer service representative to activate Windows”, click next.

3. In the next screen click the “Change Product Key” button.

4. Now enter your new product key, click the update button, close the wizard and reboot. Please note the XP product key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 in the image below will not work. This is the “corporate” key used by pirated versions of windows and has now been blacklisted by Microsoft.

5. When your computer restarts,  enter the command in step 2 to verify windows is activated and you should see “windows is already activated”.

Changing your xp key is perfectly legal if you have a valid key. You can even automate the process with a visual basic script which you can find on Microsoft’s website.

Update: If you click the link to Microsoft above you will now find the following message:

Warning The steps in the article are effective only on Volume License media. If you try these steps on OEM media or on retail media, you will not change the product key.

But unless something has changed this just isn’t true. I have used the visual basic script they provide to change both OEM and retail media keys and it worked just fine.