The Most Useful Extension (Arguably)


f all the things you should not do to your computer, O best beloved, possibly the worst is to turn it off when the Hard Disk, or indeed any other disk or writable media, is being written to.

his will invariably lead to data loss as a tiny electrical charge will distort the data around the point being written as well as you losing any data that was being written at the time. 'Why would I do this?', you may ask, but the answer is when the computer appears to have frozen.

How can you tell if the disk is being written to?
On all hard disks, there should be an indicator light, telling you that it is on. This should flicker while the disk is being accessed. If you do not have one (all should as far as I know and have seen), then you will have to either listen carefully, or get Disk Light.

Disk Light is an extension, and part of The Norton Utilities package, which simply makes a very annoying black and white icon flash in a corner of your screen. The good part about it is that the icon is a symbol saying which disk/cartridge or CD is being accessed, and a 'W' will appear under it if that medium is being written to. Simple and Sweet. I have not seen any shareware versions of this around, though I'm sure someone must have done one somewhere...

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