Making it boot faster

In the mid 1990's I was made supervisor of the system administration team for a large project undertaken by Unisys Australia. Not that I had much to do in the way of supervising; the team were excellent and the last thing they needed was micro management. Heino, as one of the three on the team, may differ but that's how I remember it.

We had about 300 people on the project; of those maybe 200 would have been programmers. I use the word programmer out of charity; of the 200 maybe 150 of them would have been out of their depth. Working exclusively in 4GL's can do that!

So one day I happened to be watching Chris, the senior system administrator, booting a users PC. He was holding the Num Lock key down. Curious, once we were back in the safety of our office I asked him why. 'Oh', he said, grinning, 'I tell users that holding Num Lock down makes the PC boot faster'. 'Uh huh' I said.

But sure enough, I found that lots of users were holding down that key during boot! Sometimes I'd ask them why (particularly the programmers). They'd gravely assure me that it halved boot time! Some people will believe anything!

So, if you ever meet someone who holds the Num Lock key down during boot, now you know where they got it from!