[Macpartners] Re: Macpartners Digest, Vol 17, Issue 4

[Kerem B Limon]

In the interest of accuracy, I'll note that this is not what I am talking about.
And I am not trying to state a flame war, but perhaps offer some feedback.

High-end PC motherboards also have diagnostics LEDs on-board, too, and PC
motherboards have practically *always* had diagnostic POST error codes and
beeps courtesy of the various IBM-compatible BIOSs since I can remember. This
may be a useful tool for the tinkerer or those of us who open up our machines.
It's good to see that Apple has adopted this trend. This, however, does not
help the average user or the tech who's trying to help them over the phone.

What I am talking about, however, is a hard drive access light or LED. Every PC
since the first IBM compatibles have had this; this is an invaluable tool for
telling--without opening up anything--whether your computer is accessing the
hard drive or not. While old tools under OS 9 like Norton Disk Light may try to
implement this in software, there is nothing like a hard-wired indicator like
this without regard to what OS is running on the machine. I've even soldered
LEDs to the hard drive pins (OK, I made a connector, fine) and slotted an LED
in some of my Apple cases for this very reason.

Have you ever put your hand on a floppy drive or laptop to 'feel' if the hard
drive was spinning? Since Apple makes an effort to design ultra-quiet hardware
(not a bad thing in and of itself), lack of audio feedback on top of other
indicators makes it even harder to tell what's going on inside the machine if
your display/screen is on the fritz!

Kerem


Quoting Eric Zelman <zelman at apple.com>:

> Folks-
> 
> We're doing some of that now with the iMac G5- 
> http://www.apple.com/support/imac/
> 
> http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86815
> 
> On Oct 8, 2004, at 12:01 PM, macpartners-request at mit.edu wrote:
> 
> > PS: BTW, this is one of the greatest shortcomings Apple refuses to fix 
> > (next to
> > the single button mouse), thanks to the 'it's a black box, don't let 
> > the user
> > know what's going on inside' philosophy. A $0.02 hard drive access LED 
> > would
> > help indicate whether there is hard disk activity at the time this 
> > happens and
> > whether it's continuing to get stuck on a corrupt sector or the like.
> -Eric
> 
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Kerem B. Limon
kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail