On 2020-10-23 03:06, VanguardLH wrote:
bad sector wrote:

It's a Durgod Taurus k-320 (made in China), and the reason I got it
was that ...
... I was up to here with num locks being ON by default so I wanted a
keyboard with NO numpad

Your BIOS might have settings for the default state of the keyboard on
boot. My BIOS (well, UEFI) has:

Bootup Num-Lock

Select whether Num Lock should be turned on or off when the system
boots up.

I can do that, but my issue was with the fact that it's
ON by default so every time I load BIOS defaults it's
there again. I suspect that 90% of users not only
never use it, they don't even know what it is so
why is it a default?

As I said it's a problem ONLY in the very early stages of boot, and

*I just realise now what that means*

..it's slow ONLY before the OS ignores the BIOS
and takes over, but then it's slow to the point of
sometimes being dead.

Got me confused. It's slow before the OS loads ("before the OS ignores
the BIOS") and it's slow when the OS loads ("then it's slow").

Sory that was badly written at two levels: I used
the word SLOW because it appeared to be slow,
it's actually either working or DEAD before the OS
loads, very hard to put a number on it like
how many times out of 10. Hitting 'Del' to get
to the BIOS edit seems to be dead most of the
time. But, when it is dead and I realize that when
I become unable to select from a boot menu with
the arrow keys then plugging into another usb
port almost always fixes the problem. At this point
the system is past BIOS and in grub's undrworld.
This same trick could maybe work too the get to
the bios to edit iot but the opportunity is missing
at that point.

Up to when the POST screen shows, the BIOS is in charge. It then
locates the boot sector in the active-marked partition on the drive,
loads the bootstrap code in that boot sector into memory, and passes
control to that bootstrap code (for the OS).

I'm not knowlegable enough to distinguish between
before and after post, and I don't know if the boot
code (strictly grub2) deals at all with usb.