my issue with them is i don't need my house lit up like a christmas tree at 2am in the morning when everything is "off", i've never found having a flashing light a great way of troubleshooting when there's a lot better tools to measure disk or network usage anyway.

disk activity lights can be pretty keen when you're trying to figure out whether or not the system is entirely halted or just slogging through a heavy workload.

the kind of time when a tool that is good at measuring such things won't ever even attempt to load.

I also enjoyed the sound that the HDD made when something was happening. So even if the computer froze, the sound gave me a bit of hope. If there was no sound from the HDD and the computer froze, I just restarted the computer, abandon all hope.

I understand this; on the other hand I pretty much want a totally quiet computer, so I don't really miss the sound. A frantically blinking LED is useful, and desirable if not too bright.

Yes. Related, I really do not need my headset to blink in the eyes of the person I sleep next to this hard. Why does it blinks seven times every time I use any command like volume up and down?

So thick black tape it is. (Can't do anything about this voice screaming the headset's status though.)

LEDs that are too bright on my laptops get similar treatment. I try to leave them a bit visible, enough to see in a dark room whether they are on, but the laptop not sending light including when it's suspended is more important.

monitoring the presence of disk and network activity in general was a lot more useful when computers only did things when you told them to and only made connections to remote hosts when you explicitly requested it. Never knowing what your devices are doing or who/what they are communicating with without having to launch a full scale investigation was nice.

> when there's a lot better tools to measure disk or network usage anyway.

Only if your system is working fine.

Only if you are okay with switching the context.

'Flashing lights' aren't the best troubleshooting tools, but they are OOB and works constantly. Frantically flashing HDD LED would say you about why the system froze for a couple of seconds way sooner when you oculd launch some performance monitor things.

Why would the disk activity or "power on" lights be "on" if "everything is "off"" though

I like my Lenovo X200 with all its glorious light indicators, some of which one can even see when the lid is closed. I wish modern laptops would have those again.

We didn't have rainmeter back when hard drives were used as boot drives. I have a pretty large set of windows performance monitor and HWInfo readouts running on all of my windows machines with modified versions of the simpleperfmeter and now rainformer skins.

No need to have uncontrolled diagnostic feedback when you can make it be exactly what you want in a much more rich/dense format. Clicking doesn't tell you much compared to time traces of read and write activity, drive temperature, and page fault rate.

All of that presumes that your system isn't already infected with malware that causes your monitoring software to lie to you.

The beauty of the LEDs is that they were directly electrically connected which means they were unaffected by malware in any way.