Network Lights

Network Lights is a lightweight Windows application whose purpose is to help you make use of your keyboard’s LEDs in order to indicate outgoing and incoming network packets on your network interface.

Portable running mode

This is a portable program that can be deployed on the target computer by simply running the executable file. In addition, you may store it on any USB flash drive or other portable devices.
The tool does not leave any entries in your Windows registry and store configuration data in your system, so you may run it without administrative privileges.

Look for the app in the system tray

You can find the utility sitting quietly in the system without interfering with your work. It is able to automatically keep an eye on the network activity and blink the Scroll Lock and Num Lock LEDs on your keyboard upon detecting activity.

Configuration settings and statistics

Network Lights gives you the possibility to access the configuration settings by performing a right-click on its icon from the system tray.
You are allowed to pick the preferred keyboard LEDs for signaling incoming and outgoing packets, namely Scroll Lock, Num Lock or Caps Lock, adjust the blink duration (in milliseconds), and enable the USB keyboard compatibility mode.
Other notable settings help you run the utility at Windows startup and indicate all traffic (TCP, UDP and ICMP packets).
What’s more, the application is able to generated statistics about the minimum and maximum timeout (in seconds), maximum connections, active and passive open connections, failed connection attempts, received and sent segments, errors, as well as cumulative number of connections.

Bottom line

All in all, Network Lights delivers a simplistic software solution for monitoring network activity (uploading and downloading tasks) from your Scroll Lock and Num Lock indicators. On the downside, it hasn’t been updated for a while, so it may cause compatibility issues on newer operating systems.