Other than that chick with the horse cock in her mouth?

Computers without hard drive activity indicators. How fucking much does it cost for an LED? Fuckers!

Solution: Buy a noisier hard-drive, so you can hear when it's doing stuff.

 

:P

It's in a laptop. I didn't realize I was as dependant on the indicators as I was. You never know what you got till it's gone right!?

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancements/Hard-Disk-Indicator.shtml

Vacuum cleaners suck too.

Know the feeling. I'm in the process of setting up a new Lenovo laptop for a guy a work. It does have an HDD indicator, but it's so incredibly dim, you need to take the laptop into a dark room just to see the fucker :(

If you need to see a hdd indicator light to tell if it's working, it's not...

Indicator lights are my friend. I always look at them to make sure the computer is working or has frozen up or become unresponsive. I worked on a laptop for a customer when I made this post and it sucked because I never knew if it was really working or not!

When installing large apps, or service packs - especially if you're installing half a dozen apps one after the other via group policy, the HDD light can be quite useful to tell you if the laptop is doing something, or if it's locked up.

If it's locked up, the mouse and keyboard stop working.

What absolute bollocks! A computer is perfectly capable of locking up whilst still processing mouse and keyboard requests!

Or in temporarily not accepting them, but not being fully locked up.

The five signs a computer has locked up:

 

It doesn't respond.
It doesn't respond.
It doesn't respond.
It doesn't respond.
It doesn't respond.

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?