Unless you are using your computer for whole lot of typing or have to enter lots of numbers, the various special lock keys like Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock are not that useful. Perhaps this is the reason why modern notebook computers rarely have the LEDs somewhere on the laptop that can readily be seen on the keyboards for desktop computers.
If your new laptop is missing these special status LEDs then you can use a free tool addLEDs to add these LEDs to the notification area of Windows desktop. In addition to displaying the status of lock keys of your keyboard, it can also display the hard drive and network activity of your PC. It is a portable program and works Windows 7, 8.x and 10.
By default, it uses a red-green icon profile – red for off and green for on. This icon profile can be changed to many others provided. You can change it to transparent, black-white, green-red, blue-red, green-blue-red, blue-green-red etc. Not only it uses colored icons to indicate the status, it also uses uppercase or lowercase letters, for example, a for caps lock off, A for caps lock on, S for scroll lock, 1 for num lock, D for disc activity and N for network.
You can turn the various key locks on or off using your Fn function keys (for laptops) and the usual lock keys for desktop computers. But you can also right-click on any of these status LEDs and use the Switch option to toggle these keys. If you hate using the Fn keys to toggle caps lock then you can easily use this option to turn caps lock on or off.
If your keyboard has become faulty and the lock keys are not working then you can use addLEDs to toggle these locks on or off. It is also useful when you are trying to enter a password but it is not working – a quick look at the addLEDs in the notification area can show you that password might not be working because caps lock is on.
You can download addLEDs from https://www.wintools.info/index.php/addleds.