Quieting Windows 7 down....

MilesAhead said:

Dang!! I was hoping this would solve my issue, but no go. In my case I get the "clock tick" LED but what is different is, if I go into Device Manager and disable the optical drive, it stops. I've seen several posts around the web with the same thing. That's where I got the idea to try disabling the drive. I don't know what it is, but it must be sending some signal to the optical drive for some reason. I have AutoPlay and AutoStart turned off.

As it is I just try to ignore it since it's not really the HD being accessed.

I can stop it that way too... that's how I verified what it was.

What I discovered was that it's a flaw in some older SATA controllers. There is no hardware signal for disk insertion on the SATA interface so the system has to poll the Optical drive (or any hot swap drives) asking repeatedly "are we there yet?". On some of the older controllers this was seen as a disk access so the chassis LED is turned on. Blip...Blip...Blip...

On Win2000 and XP the answer is to disable CD Autorun but on Vista and 7 this tweak doesn't seem to work. So we're stuck with it... but it doesn't stop the HDD from spinning down... it's just an annoyance.

The problem of the drives not spinning down is solved, at least in my case, by the "TimeStampInterval" tweak I found and described earlier in the thread.

MilesAhead said:

Thanks for the info. I never spin my drives down until shutdown. To me the only problem is the LED flicker.

It's kind of funny (and a little embarassing) but way back at the beginning of all this someone suggested I just put a piece of black tape over the LED. He gave no reasoning just made a flippant comment... and now look where we are....

You could try the resistor trick, if you feel like a little DIY, at least then it's not bright enough to be distracting... Works on those blue laser beam power LEDs too.

MilesAhead said:

My PCs are on the floor under the table. Makes it easier to ignore it. My new PC had a different issue. For some strange reason brilliant designers at HP decided to put a dim green HD access LED right below a bright purple power on LED. Esp. at the angle looking down, when I wanted to check the HD access, the purple LED wiped out the dim green.

I see that a lot with the new Blue power LEDs... man those things are like laser beams, twice as bright as any other LED on the machine. That's where the resistor trick came from... I actually get paid to cut the wires inside people's computers

My brilliant solution was to cut a black cardboard rectangle from an old shoe box and tape it over the purple LED. It does the job.

So would a little bit of black electrical tape... but you really should think about dimming it down instead of hiding it...

CarlTR6 said:

Seems like folks are obsessed with LED's, especially blue.

LOL... Are we hinting at something Carl?

Actually if you go to anyplace where they have electronics on display, check out the stuff with blue pilot lights vs the stuff with amber or red... those @$#^%@ blue LEDs are easily twice as bright.