A funny thing happens when you hook up an LED to a speaker so that it pulses to the beat of the music you’re playing: It looks really cool. In other words, there’s no practical purpose I can think of for cramming a sound-reactive LED inside a netbook. But LEDs don’t tend to use a lot of power, and if…

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Most netbooks have a handful of status LEDs that let you know when the computer is charging, when the hard drive is active, or when the WiFi or Bluetooth are turned on. But honestly, how often do you need those indicators? Wouldn’t it be more useful if you had an LED that lit up when you received a new email…

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While some netbook makers *cough* *MSI* *cough* seem to feel the need to throw so many status LEDs on their case that it’s tough to tell what any individual blinking light means at a glance, others have taken a much simpler approach. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9, for example, has just two status lights: One for power, and another for…

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