Download of the Week: Network Lights

Posted 12/30/2009 at 12:45pm | by David Murphy

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Were only every download as fun as Network Lights. Seriously. This week's download of the week isn't going to transform your computing experience, speed up your PC, or otherwise give you any additional details about your system's operations beyond that which you already have. Sort-of.

As I've mentioned in past posts, one of the critical omissions of the Windows 7 operating system is its brazen elimination of the useful network activity icon from the lower-right corner of your screen. This tiny bit of your Windows desktop, no larger than a little icon on your taskbar, provided you a wealth of information at a glance. Immediately, you could look at the icon and see if your network connection was sending or receiving information--a useful troubleshooting tool if, in fact, no light was blinking. Hovering your mouse over the icon would deliver a complete summary of all the bits and bytes of data you've sent or received since the last reset of your PC.

That's about it.

Still, useful features given that the exact same icon sits in the Windows 7 taskbar... without any of the blinking and without any of the summary features found on its predecessor. Although Network Lights doesn't do much to assist with the latter, its ability to transform your keyboard into a working version of the network activity icon is two parts fun, one part useful.

As the name implies, Network Lights transforms your keyboard into a blinking version of a network activity meter. Your Number Lock and Scroll Lock keys will flicker on and off as you download and upload data. And this little Christmas Tree-like display will remain perfectly synchronized with the amount of traffic you're outputting or receiving. You can also use the included configuration menu to assign this blinking to the Caps Lock key as well. I recommend you don't do so, as the blinking isn't just cosmetic--it triggers the keys on and off. And while visualizing your bandwidth is fun and all, the last thing you want to do is start typing like a 14-year-old ScrIPTkiDDiE. Et cetera.