Seeing hard disk access lights

G

grannybuttons

Registered
One of the irritations of moving to an iBook from an XP laptop is missing the hard disk access lights. I'd really appreciate seeing them, especially when (all too frequently) I'm faced with the spinning beach ball of death and I'm wondering if the program has crashed or I've asked it to do too much and it's simply thrashing away. Is there any utility I can add that will show the HD access light?

Thanks
Andrew Denny
 
However, if your computer is stalling (Beach Ball), these menu items probably won't be updated live, even if the computer's still crunching and the drive's still sending data to the processor. Basically, you'd be better off fixing the system (find out why those beach ball sessions happen...), since you then just don't need those LEDs. ;-)
 
That is not 100% true since the beach ball is app specific and not system specific. You can see this as you move the mouse across windows from various apps the ball will appear and disappear depending on which ones are struggling. So the little blinken lights may still have a hole of running OK, not a guarantee but I would not write them off out of hand.
 
I'm not sure if either fryke or lurk is correct, but if seeing the hard disk light reassures me, what's the harm? This query arose out of problems I've always had with my iBook, the only Mac I've ever had. Certain programs will spin the beach ball for ages, and recently I've been using Wiretap to record streaming broadcasts. The most recent was an hour long, and then I got a beach ball for a long time after, and nothing else happened, although other programs ran OK, if perhaps slightly slowly. I wasn't sure if it was the computer busy turning a temporary file into a permanent one, or a crash that merited a 'force-quit'.

In the event the precious AIFF file eventually appeared after several minutes, but if I'd have seen the hard disk light I'd have been reassured and not been tempted to force-quit.

Have to say that "Basically, you'd be better off fixing the system (find out why those beach ball sessions happen...), since you then just don't need those LEDs" is not really an adequate answer. Having the hard disk light would *help* me find out why the beach ball is appearing!
 
Lurk does have a point. Whenever I get the beachball (tends to be on Heavy Garageband projects) if I just click on the desktop, the menu bar changes and it's all ok. But when on GB, if I hover over the menu bar, the beachball's there.
 
Like Lrk said, the beachball indicates that the current application is busy and not accepting user input or intervention. Usually, when you switch to a different application, all is well -- it may run slowly due to the processor load which the "beachball" app is imposing, but if other apps seem O.K. during this time, it's probably safe to say that the beachball is app-specific.

However: I have encountered times when the entire computer simultaneously exhibits the beachball, usually signaling that some underlying core process, like the WindowServer or something that would affect system-wide processes is stuck or malfunctioning.

When the beachball happens, is it specific to one application, or does the entire system become unresponsive?
 
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