Why doesn't my super-turbo-mega-ultra expensive notebook/laptop have a HDD activity indicator?

So, you've finally bought a new notebook/laptop? And of course, before you've actually bought it, you quadchecked all of it's features googl'd out every single review and user comment, right? And you've just unpacked it and stared using it, maybe even connected on external display? But, you just feel like something is missing ... and you finally noticed - your laptop doesn't have a HDD indicator LED! Or even better if it does have one, but manufacturer (I will deliberately not mention which one it is - all of you who have it will know, all other take a guess!) decided to place it on such a "wonderful" place that you at least will need a mirror to see what it's showing.
For all of you reading this and still not quite getting it, ore even better all of you with HDD activity indicator built in your laptops, just keep reading on or just switch to some more interesting topic as this one will not become more interesting that it actually is! The rest of you will know where I'm heading to ...



I really spent a lot of time searching for solution to this problem and even Google didn't help me out too much. I came across HddLed Indicator, DiskLED, FloatLED, HardDriveIndicator, Hard Disk Indicator, FloatLED and least but not the last O&O DriveLed. Some of those are free, some are outdated, some are fully commercial products. BUT, the point is I've tried them all and none of the was flawless! So, how can it be you might ask? The thing is some of them reside in tray, some on screen and finally some of them can turn on/off some of your keyboard LED's which are rarely or never used like Scroll Lock (do you know what it's used for, huh?). All other methods except the last one turned out useless for me, so I headed for turning on/off my keyboard LED's. But, as there always is a BUT, program which could do this trick (I would tell you it's name, but to be honest I forgot which one it actually was) happened to invoke my laptpos's OSD each time it turned LED's on and off, which you can guess turned out to be even more irritating, even the idea was quite great.

Well, since I really (from various reasons) wanted to see if something is really going on on my HDD, even I don't have a HDD activity indicator on my laptop and I use on docking station, I took another expedition and finally found it! Even better I found it in a place where I never expected to find it! Excited to hear more? Well my solution actually can in a form of AutoHotkey script! I knew what Auto HotKey was, and it indeed is a great piece of free software but I just didn't even think about it could/will solve all of my problems with HDD activity indicator! OK, so here is how to get it (to get it to work you don't need to install AutoHotKey except if you don't need it for other purposes):

1. Go to http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/post-366484.html#366484; you will see a post with source code for DriveLeds v1.2,
2. Select all of the code and paste it into new plain text file (you can use Notepad, even I highly recommend you to use Notepad++),
3. Save it as let's say DriveLeds.ahk (the first part of name is arbitrary, but make sure extension should be .ahk!) on your HDD, wherever you like,
4. Go to http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/post-463050.html#463050 and download utility which will enable you to compile script from previous step into .exe file as it will be the easiest way to use this great little utility,
5. Make an .exe file ie. DriveLeds.exe and voila! You have a great little tool you can use to monitor your HDD activity! You can even choose if you want to compile x32 or x64 version of it.

I wanted to post compiled version of DriveLeds .ahk script here, but I just wouldn't do it without author's permission, and to be honest wanted to make you at least a little challenge before solving one of your's most unimportant problems!
All I can add is thank you r0lZ from AutoHotKey Forum, for making this script!

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