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Every time I think about Wintel laptops, I'm reminded of this piece:

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly_overrated.htm...

(summary: people buy things with more knobs and lights because the illusion of control gives them the impression that it is more powerful)

My Toshiba Satellite has five LEDs in a row on the front. Three of them are on continuously (one turns orange, I think, when it sleeps). One represents hard disk activity, though Task Manager's I/O graph is vastly more useful. One of them has never turned on. I have no idea what it's for. It has an icon above it that sort of looks like a piece of paper. I'm sure someone at Toshiba thought it was a good idea to forgo the anti-reflective screen coating in favor of a few more LEDs. "Consumers will love all the extra power afforded by the paper-light!" he said.



I'm sure someone at Toshiba thought it was a good idea to forgo the anti-reflective screen coating in favor of a few more LEDs.

I don't think it's missing anti-reflectivity. My Toshiba seems to have an extra-reflective screen. Something about making contrast better for watching movies on it in the dark. shrug


> One of them has never turned on. I have no idea what it's for. It has an icon above it that sort of looks like a piece of paper.

Totally off-topic, but have you happened to start a print job on your machine and look at that light on Windows? That's my closest guess.


I think it might actually represent the built-in SD reader, which at least makes sense, though it's still useless to me.




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