What about (the many) tasks that run without a clear indicator of progress. If you can see the HDD whirring away then you know something is happening and to leave it. If the HDD light has been off for 5 minutes then you can confidently assume something has broke.

And how about when a particular start-up process has hung? Windows is still responding, the cursor is still moving around, but there's bugger all disk activity, no icons, and no sign of anything happening. It's been many years since I last saw Windows hang to the degree that the cursor froze, yet I've seen plenty of instances of a hung process causing Windows to stop in its tracks - despite the cursor still working.

Either way, in these situations a working HDD light is quite useful to tell you if Windows has hung, or whether it's doing something in the background still.

suffice to say that, when in windows, you can't get the task manager open (and deal with whatever problem from there), it's time for a hard reset. You may be able to slide the cursor back and forth 'til the cows come home, yet clicking on anything yields no response.

 

This is what I mean by "The computer has stopped responding".

 

On very rare occasions (and usually in linux or os x), a usb keyboard (and anything daisy-chained to it) will stop working until I unplug and re-plug it.

 

I've also seen hdd lights continue intermittent blinking for long periods after a pc has hard-locked. I wouldn't say the lights are completely useless, but by the same token they aren't completely reliable, and certainly not essential.

Im on my phone so can't be arse to write much, but your entire first paragraph is wrong and misinformed.

(hug)

I use my lights all the time on my laptop, especially when starting up to know when I can use it. It's so old that if it's not all loaded up nothing works.

Let me guess: you use it for a reading light?

I don't know how to read!

And who are you being rude to on the phone, by reading and answering forum posts while they drone endlessly on about something you have no interest in?

 

Your mom?

Ah. Now I understand the need for the blinking light. Does it do morse code for you?

Binary!

But seriously how expensive is an LED? Keep putting them in please!

I'm with the LED gang. I'm always using hard drive indicator lights at work to make sure computers are getting all of their network-sent msi packages fired at them, purely because they all run totally hidden.

 

Helen's Dell XPS 15 has a hard drive indicator light on the back of it. So anyone watching her use it can see the hard drive working, but she can't while using it. Seems pretty stupid if you ask me.

Yeah that doesn't sound very useful. You can't just stick LED's wherever you want to LED sticking people!