A More Active Networking Icon?

[NewsBot]

One of the many things I miss from Windows XP is it's lack of a more active networking icon in the system tray. It's nice to have the little globe on the networking icon to show you that you're connected to the internet. Not that it always shows up-to-date results and not that you couldn't figure that out yourself.

 

But XP used to have a network icon that actively showed if there was traffic going out or coming in. And more important, the little lights stayed lit if there was solid traffic. That used to be extremely useful in knowing what your machine was doing and what you were waiting on. It was even more helpful as a web developer to see if your waiting was because of a large payload, a stuck recursive call, or the server just not responding in a timely fashion. Instead we have this dinky status icon in Vista which blinks slowly*in a very predictable fashion to indicate activity. It's useless.

 

Does anyone know of a way to get more of the XP network icon in Vista? And yes,*I know that the sidebar could be used, but that isn't an ideal solution.

 

More...

 

View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds