If you have bought a new laptop in the last few years, you have noticed that among the things all makers have done to annoy includes saving maybe 50 cents by eliminating status leds. Has my laptop hung up ? Is that program in an endless loop ? WTF is GOING ON !!?? You used to have a clue if the HD led was steady on or wouldn't stop flickering...now....who knows?
OK, there's an easy fix: tons and tons of stupid little utilities that will provide a replacement indicator on screen. Then you start looking and find the 'gotcha'... almost all these utilities are stupid..very stupid. Go look and you will instantly find a plethora of such utilities...all of which will put an indicator in your system tray.. you know the box at the right end of the taskbar at the bottom... you know that taskbar which virtually anyone who has a laptop, where available real estate is always at a premium, has been set to autohide so it's not using up space until you need it...
so we have a HD indicator in a place we mostly can't actually see unless we deliberately go looking...this is brain dead... what we need is an indicator we can place where we want it on the desktop...everyone making these can't be that dense...
Turns out some of these authors do, indeed, offer an alternative to signal you...they can make the scroll lock led on your keyboard act as a hd activity led. Sigh, most laptops never even had that led...this is going nowhere...
It turns out there is one intelligent author, and he has done this completely correctly: you control size, shape, look and feel of the indicators, where they go, transparency, ability to click-through the indicators, yes you can even get it to minimize into the stupid system tray if you want it there. This post is for the few who might want this so they don't get to spend a week trying to find the one really intelligent completely free answer to a simple need:
http://www.stone-oakvalley-studios.com/floatled_index.php
OK, there's an easy fix: tons and tons of stupid little utilities that will provide a replacement indicator on screen. Then you start looking and find the 'gotcha'... almost all these utilities are stupid..very stupid. Go look and you will instantly find a plethora of such utilities...all of which will put an indicator in your system tray.. you know the box at the right end of the taskbar at the bottom... you know that taskbar which virtually anyone who has a laptop, where available real estate is always at a premium, has been set to autohide so it's not using up space until you need it...
so we have a HD indicator in a place we mostly can't actually see unless we deliberately go looking...this is brain dead... what we need is an indicator we can place where we want it on the desktop...everyone making these can't be that dense...
Turns out some of these authors do, indeed, offer an alternative to signal you...they can make the scroll lock led on your keyboard act as a hd activity led. Sigh, most laptops never even had that led...this is going nowhere...
It turns out there is one intelligent author, and he has done this completely correctly: you control size, shape, look and feel of the indicators, where they go, transparency, ability to click-through the indicators, yes you can even get it to minimize into the stupid system tray if you want it there. This post is for the few who might want this so they don't get to spend a week trying to find the one really intelligent completely free answer to a simple need:
http://www.stone-oakvalley-studios.com/floatled_index.php
