meter in upper-right corner?

sorry if this seems dumb, i searched around and couldn't find anything...

i recently opened my riocar for the first time to add a second hard drive. everything went perfectly. while i was at it, i moved from 2.00 final consumer to 2.00 final dev, and put the latest hijack kernel on there (i don't know what version i was using previously). since then, there's this strange "meter" in the upper right corner of the display, on top of my visualization. it looks like a small round pill. it is not always there, and seems to appear and disappear at random. i call it a meter because it can be totally filled-in, totally hollow, or anywhere in between. for the life of me, i can't figure out what this is supposed to represent, why it's there, or how to get rid of it. can anyone enlighten me? here's my best ASCII representation of the meter: (||||| )

thanks. -spatula

The 'meter' represents disk activity. I don't remember details right now, but it can be turned off. Serch the board for 'disk activity' or similar.

FAQ entry

aaah, now it all makes sense. not sure how it got enabled, but now i can finally go disable it. thanks a lot!

-spatula

You are welcome. I personally like to leave it on, BTW. I don't know exactly why; probably the same reason I have all kinds of activity and performance monitors running on my workstation - gives an illusion of control, I guess....

Since this is resolved, can I swing off topic and ask:

Do you have any little performance monitors for Windows 2k/XP? Forever, I've been running on my Windows 95 machine, trusty System Monitor in a tiny window on the bottom of my screen. It shows me bytes read, bytes written, free memory, and (tries to show CPU activity).

But when I move to XP, I probably won't have that. It's such a helpful little thing to see. Like the heartbeat of my computer, i can tell when it's strained, working too hard for no reason, etc etc.

Any trusty, native, preferably bundled-with-Windows solutions for old System Monitor in the 21st century?

task manager will sit in your system tray and show everything you want and more. ctrl-alt-del will bring up a window that you can click 'task manager' on, or you can right click on your taskbar and select it.

Or Ctrl+Shift+Esc

Quote:
But when I move to XP, I probably won't have that. It's such a helpful little thing to see. Like the heartbeat of my computer, i can tell when it's strained, working too hard for no reason, etc

Actually, I have nothing better than task manager in the tray (not very helpful when minimised there: it only shows CPU which is always 100% since I run SETI@Home, but easy to pop open), and performance monitor, which is quite customizable, but various items around the main chart area cannot be pruned sufficiently to leave only a little window in the corner...