M$ Please bing back animated network icons etc.

Ok bit of a silly thread this as such a small thing probably wouldn't bother to many people.

Just how many people out there miss the animated network icons on the taskbar present in older Windows systems upto and including Vista?

I mean the icons are very nice and all but surely it wouldn't have took much to add some animation. It is kind of nice to see that you have activity going on without opening a browser to convince you. Also it was easy to see if there was activity going on that shouldn't be. There has been many a time I have used it as a first step to discovering dodgy background tasks.

I recon a patition to microsoft. lol



BRING BACK ANIMATED ICONS IN THE TASKBAR!

Yea, I miss those, even though I have my taskbar set to auto-hide.

I removed my network and action center icons from the active area all together and set them only show notifications, I don't feel I have a need to see them and prefer my network meter that shows the exact amount of incoming and outgoing traffic.

I missed the animated network icon for a while but, like Mr. Grim above, I have started using a network monitor gadget instead.

Yes network gadgets are good but also resource hungry and far more than most might need. I just think its nice to have that small amount of movement bottom left of taskbar. When you are sorting out other peoples machines, they might not want gadgets across there screens and indeed many don't like anything appart from a desktop.
Yes i understand we all might want something more on our desktop, but I just think it was nice to see instantly on any installation that there was incoming and outgoing network activity without installing anything else.

Yeah, I've converted to a gadget as well (with graphing, etc) but I do like having options. I've wondered why they removed the animation, it's been there for quite a few OS versions.

The only reason I switched to a gadget was out of necessity. In fact, the missing animation was the first thing I noticed when I installed my first Win7 build. I was hoping they would bring it back, but have been resigned to the fact that, if there is a problem with my connection, I will get that little yellow warning sign.

+1 for the return of network animations for me, although I did think the Vista network animation was nowhere near as good as the old XP one.

+1 for me too, as it does give an indication of network activity and also the direction of traffic at a particular instant in time.

+1 Especially about how it was in XP like z3r010 says. I think MS is trying to make it more "neat" without it...but that's the wrong approach for this particular item. Put it back, I say.

I have to agree. the network activity icon can be a life saver at times.. Knowing when stuff is talking to your apache and SQL etc can be a BIG help.
It has never seemed to have worked 'properly' since win98 though, IMO.

Thanks Studulike for reminding me the paperclip animation in W98, I like those little things.

You liked the animated paperclip? I hated it.

However, I miss the tiny double-monitor network icon from XP terribly. It was a great indicator of things going well and things gone wrong. I don't want to give over desk space to meters or gadgets -- I want as little infringing on my work area as possible. That little icon was prefect for the job at hand.

The xp animated icons are the best, vista's version is weak and win7, it may as well be dead. The only thing it shows me is the yellow triangle for limited connection on the occasional bootup and the only way I have found to fix that is reboot.

For anyone who actually misses clippy - Here you go,

View attachment clippy.zip

As for the network animation I think one reason it was removed from Windows 7 was that the Vista one caused so many support calls and forum posts due to it either not working or indicating an incorrect status.

Now that may not be a great reason for the change but I can understand the reasoning. I have lost count of the times I've been told "I've got a red X in the tray" on systems with perfectly working networks.

Windows 7 does have animation for the Wireless network icon of course where it indicates signal strength.

Thanks Barman58, you made my day.

this exists in 7077 !!! except the bars aint green that are off-white !!!

heh, while i kind of miss the little flashing green lights, i'm kind of indifferent to them being there or not, since i've started using rainmeter+enigma skin which has a fantastic network icon showing wired or wifi, and a set of small bar graphs for up or down :v uses minimal cpu, (RM itself uses about 25mb of ram) and i can toss on a few other things to suit my tastes, like cpu meters, a weather forcast/temp/etc section, and even a twitter reader to keep up with the guy who was responsible for cwalken (trelvix, anyone?) so while it's nice to have something similar in w7, i'm not going to beat a potentially dead horse.


however, if ms were to include something rather similar to this particular icon/bar set, well. far be it from me to complain ;D

requirements for nifty setup like in thumbnail/image;

rainmeter: rainmeter - Google Code
enigma skin for rainmeter: Enigma by ~Kaelri on deviantART
CD Art Display: CD Art Display
Pure Adium skin: Pure Adium - CD Art Display by ~Nevezen on deviantART
foorbar2000, winamp or itunes (for CAD)
some free time and a bit of patience/know how.
most of the things above have install tutorials either in the archive file or on the site itself, or are straight program installers. configuring them? that takes the working part ;o

and please note that CAD can be somewhat annoying to get just the way you want it (i've dumped several hours into tweaking it, and am still touching it up here and there.. like how i just tweaked the date/time in RM a second ago after noticing it was off a bit hah.)

Does anyone else see the irony in starting a thread title with "M$" and then saying, "Please".

:roflmao:

Good point Patrick