I’m a Mac guy. I cut my teeth on Macs back in the early ’90’s, have worked in prepress since then, and with the exception of an Amstrad Word Processor and an IBM PC/XT, have had nothing but Macs at home. At work I have the distinct and dubious privilege of providing support for both Macs & PC’s on the network, and one thing about Macs that I really appreciate is that you never have to hit Num Lock to get the numerical keypad to work.
I’ve never understood why it is that some PC’s switch the Num Lock off whenever you log off, shut down or restart the machine. According to Wikipedia it’s a throwback to the dinosaurs of computerdom;
The Num Lock key exists because earlier 84-key IBM PC keyboards did not have arrows separate from the numeric keypad. Num Lock would be used to choose between the two functions. On laptop computers, Num Lock keys are used to convert part of the main keyboard to act as a (slightly skewed) numeric keypad rather than letters.
Don’t know if that’s really the case, but either way, it’s pretty lame. True, you can set up a script to force your PC to remember your preference, but why in the heck should it be so difficult to do something so simple?
The astute reader might also ask why it’s so difficult to remember to hit the key every time, and true, it’s not a big deal. But my point is that it shouldn’t be something I have to deal with at all. Like on a Mac. It’s just always on.
Sigh. Just one more reason to prefer Macs.