HD activity light or lack off

Is it me or is it that more and more laptops do not have these lights? i am sorting out a laptop, not too old, it is a Acer I3 thing, pretty large really for a laptop, i have noticed that there is no HD activity light, this is the third laptop I have had in my hands over the last few months that do not have one.


i do not think I could cope with a computer without a light flashing to say it is accessing the HD, in fact the only two lights that seems to be on this machine is for power and Wi-fi

Dell Studio 1555 over 5 years old and doesn't have any lights at all. No HDD, caps lock, etc.

There must be an app for that!

Your wish is my command...

There used to be software around ito give people a HD activity light typoe thing n windows 95 days.

I like knowing what the hard drive is doing, not in every day use, but if for some reason the computer freezes I can see if it is using the hard drive or not.

Surly it can not save that much money to not put a LED on a computer?
I have also seen the odd desktop that do not have one either and the lack of reset buttons on desktops is getting annoying as well.

Press and hold the power button for a hard reset?

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I like knowing what the hard drive is doing, not in every day use, but if for some reason the computer freezes I can see if it is using the hard drive or not.

I use Resource Manager for this. Having 4 disks in my main computer I find it useful to know what process is causing disk activity and which drive and files are in use. The same goes for CPU, memory, or network usage.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

Press and hold the power button for a hard reset?

I know that and while I do not expect a reset on a laptop, it is useful on a desktop. I suppose these days computers are suppose to be more reliable than they used to be, so we should not have to reset so often, but with Windows it is still useful

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

I use Resource Manager for this. Having 4 disks in my main computer I find it useful to know what process is causing disk activity and which drive and files are in use. The same goes for CPU, memory, or network usage.

You mean the one built into windows? for saome reason I can not even get task manager up, it shows in the taskbar and it shows a thumbnail above the taskbar, but it will not open in a windows, very strange.


i am not that bothered about what is using what, I have 4 hard drives in my desktop plus the Blue-ray writer.

It seems to be part of general trend - stop telling the users anything about what is happening behind the scenes in case it confuses them, it isn't limited to computers - e.g. most modern car's temperature gauge lie so users don't get concerned

Funnily enough, I was driving a loan car the other day and I was surprised at how much more information it displayed compared to my older car (but a higher model). Whether it was accurate or not I couldn't say.

Another reason for the lack of disk activity lights is the increasing use of NVM Express, where the interface to a SSD is PCI Express. With a NVMe drive, there is no disk controller on the motherboard to generate a disk activity signal.

Makes no difference now anyway, I think the laptop is dead, I reinstalled windows 7 and it is really slow, so IO thought i would stick 10 on it and it is no different, so gone back to 7 and it keeps coming up with this is not responding, that is not responding, I check the memory that is ok, done a check on the hard drive that came back ok. The lid is warped and will not close, it is as if someone been sat on top of it or the computer have got too hot when it was closed, there is also something rattling around in the device.

i will update Windows 7 on it, if I can as windows 7 update is playing up and then it can go back to the owner. Shame really as it is an I3 machine with 4Gb of ram, so not cheap when it was new.
i would rescue the memory and hard drive