When you are busy working on your laptop, the last thing you need is a constantly flickering hard drive activity light distracting you. Is there an easy way to disable it or should you go with a more round-about solution? Today's SuperUser Q&A post has some solutions to a frustrated reader's problem.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

The Question

SuperUser reader AnonymousPerson wants to know how to disable a computer's hard drive LED light:

It is very bothersome to work with my Windows 10 laptop (a Dell Inspiron 5000 Series with an Intel Core i5) when there is a constant light flashing in my face. Is there a way to either edit the registry or the BIOS to stop the hard drive activity light from flashing?

How do you disable a computer's hard drive LED light?

The Answer

SuperUser contributor Joshua Voskamp has the answer for us:

Tape over it. Disregarding whether that is a good idea or not, the easiest way to disable the LED light is most likely opening your laptop case up and unplugging the LED ribbon cable. Barring that as a possibility, the next most practical solution would be placing tape (or an aesthetically pleasing sticker) over the LED light.

While it may be theoretically possible to modify chip firmware somewhere on your motherboard, there will not be an easy way to do so in a software setting because the engineers designing computers (for various reasons) believe that is a bad idea.

Source: Notebook Review Forums

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Image Credit: Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier (Flickr)