Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Ed Bott posted an nice article on a replacement “network activity” indicator for Windows 7 that actually blinks when inbound or outbound data is coming or going.

One question I hear often from Windows 7 upgraders (more often than I would have expected, in fact) is, "What happened to the old network activity indicator?" It’s true: the Windows 7 designers got rid of that little icon in the notification area that flashes to indicate that your network adapter is busy. One of the key design goals of Windows 7 was to make Windows "less noisy," and the Windows design team paid especially close attention to pop-up messages and other potential distractions in the lower right corner of the screen.

Personally, I don’t miss that flashing icon. But if you want it back, you can download a tiny utility written by Igor Tolmachev. It’s called, not surprisingly, Network Activity Indicator for Windows 7:

It uses a mere 1.3 MB of RAM and does exactly what it promises.

Update: In response to a question via Twitter, yes, this works with 64-bit Windows 7 editions as well as 32-bit (x86).

[Taken from Ed Bott’s blog]