A cool LED disk activity indicator light for free
Back in the day when Desktops ruled, there used to be a little LED light in the front of the tower that showed your hard drive activity. Back in the day, most of us had very little RAM, and the little green light was flickering constantly because the hard drive was not only being accessed by requests you were making (running programs, writing emails, etc.) but also because Windows was carving out huge chunks of virtual memory. Now with laptops and some new desktops, many of us don’t have the LED indicator so we can’t easily see how much our hard drives are being accessed. If the hard drive is being accessed even when you’re not using your computer, then you probably don’t have enough RAM. And besides all the reasons why you’d want to see hard drive access activity, the little green light is pretty cool in its own right.
This small program (approx. 1MB) doesn’t need to be installed. Just download, unzip, and click the exe file. It will show in your system tray (next to the clock). If you don’t see anything there after you click the exe, it’s because your hard drive cannot be accessed. If you see it flashing green all the time, then your computer is probably running slowly because either you’re doing too much multi-tasking or you don’t have enough RAM. You don’t want to be in a situation where Windows uses your hard drive as memory – that’s not good. Mine’s flashing right now because I’ve got about 24 programs open and only 4 GB of RAM. Yikes!
Be sure to read the information on the developer’s page if you want to get the most from the program. Those of you who just want to run it and see the flashing green activity light can do that too. Visit the DiskLED home page to learn more and/or download DiskLED – you’ll be glad you did…I think!
Oh, I forgot… here’s a word from the developer of DiskLED:
“DiskLED is a cool little free program that shows how much your hard drive is being accessed. If you want to customize it, just right-click its icon in the system tray
What do you do when your computer reacts sluggishly to even the simplest commands? You probably look at its hard disk LED to determine if the disk is busy because if it is, the only thing that really helps is waiting (apart from buying a faster disk or SSD). Problem solved – if you are sitting right next to the machine. But what if you use a protocol like RDP or ICA to connect to a remote computer or VM? No HDD LED, no quick and simple way to check for hard drive activity. This has been bugging me enough to write a software replacement: DiskLED.
DiskLED is a little application that sits in the system tray and flickers whenever the hard disk is accessed. It looks like this:”
Again, you can download this program (or learn more about it) from the developer’s DiskLED Web site. Yes, it is free :-). It works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32/64bit).
Oh…thank you. I have been looking for this for a long time. It used to be supplied by pcworld called HDIndicator and I used it for many years. Since VISTA and WIN7 came into the picture, I have not been able to find it….this is just what I have wanted. Thank you so much!!!!! DBaumann
This is a FABULOUS little tool. I use it on all my VMs, as there is no physical light on them. Wish you could have multiple instances (one for C:, one for D: and one for E: ) not found a way…and also change the color of them.