Network icon animation ???

why the icon animation of the Internet (in the task bar) doesn't reflect the real traffic activity ?
when i right clicked on the icon, i select "turn on activity animation" , it started to animate but it doesn't reflect the real internet traffic .
thats an important issue for me, because sometimes i don't know whether the internet is down or not unless i see this icon .
is there a solution ?

 

I also found that annoying.

If when you turn on the activity animation still doesn't work then I don't know anything else you can try.

 

That is curious. I presume we are all talking of the RTM? Mine is working. Hunting through the options, I see I have my "flow control" enabled on the adapter. Could that be the driving force behind the icon?

 

can you post a picture of it? Vista has that excellent snippet program.

 

A thought comes to mind. My animation is positive, but quite faint. Could it depend on what theme or background one is using for the desktop?
In my attachment, the two panels intermittently flash whilst I am accessing anything on the web.
P.S. I should add, as you probably know, that, until my internet connection is established, the panel has a yellow icon imposed on it. This also re-appears if I should lose the connection. So, for my useage, the fact that it has, or has not, animation, is not too important.

 

this icon was very simple and usefull in XP .
i don't know why Microsoft didn't implement it in Vista. i mean there is no reason you can think of that justified to Mirosoft to change the indication and functionality of this icon.

 

However the icon in XP was much more precise. If you were only sending data or receiving only one of the icon would light up.

Since i don't have Vista right know I can't figure out how precise it is when you do turn on animation.

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Thanks for the pic.

 

Just popped back into XP to have a look. It seems precisely the same ? as I said, it does not stand out so well but does flash one window for send, and another for receive.

 

I see this is nearly two years old, but I was wondering if anybody has ever figured out a way to get a real network activity icon in the system tray on Vista. This new one is no good! I wish it would accurately reflect the transmit/receive data, just like XP did.

 

this program does what we want

http://www.dalesplace.net/download/LanLightNTF.zip

 

It sure does! Thanks for the heads-up. That program works great, and it actually seems to be faster than the old XP animation, meaning that it looks like there is less lag in its updating. Very nice!