In what world would anybody need to deactivate their numpad?
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Finance people have numlock on all the time so they get numbers when they press the keys because they prefer numpads to long lines of numbers (quicker to type in digits and numerical figures). They use the numpad like a calculator, basically.
Gamers used to numlock off all the time so they get cursor movement when they press those same keys instead (the normal cursor keys only give you left, right, up and down, but with the numpad you have diagonals (1, 3, 7, 9) and a centre button too – and many games used this).
Like all the lights on your keyboard, the buttons are technically no longer necessary (CapsLock is convenient, you could argue, but not necessary). If you want, look at Scroll Lock which nobody has used in 20 years, to be honest (it was to stop the text scrolling off the top of a text terminal).
In those days, keys like this were called modifiers and were treated differently to the letter or number keys. Ctrl-Alt-Delete used to generate what’s called a non-maskable interrupt (i.e. something that the OS cannot interfere with in any way, to let you reboot the machine if the OS locked up). Now it’s used to lock your machine and log onto it.
Nowadays, though, all keys are just inputs. Scroll lock registers a scancode just like any other key, so you can assign it to do almost anything you like (e.g. in a game’s keyboard configuration). Num Lock the same. And the keys that Num Lock affects don’t really change now (games etc. just know what the key is the same no matter whether Num Lock is on or off and treat it appropriately, but things like Word will either type numbers or move you around the document depending on the state of Num Lock).
So it’s mostly legacy, but it does have a use, it’s just not a use that most people would make.
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