Although this subject was covered briefly on other pages of this site, the Windows Experience Index feature of Windows Vista needed to have a page of its own. This makes the information easier to find, allows more in depth coverage of this subject and provides room to show how and where to find the base score of a computer running Windows Vista. The mentioned pages gave a definition but the purpose and "how to" of this rating was never made clear. Starting with Portfolio(page 6) and the pages following a reader may gain enough information to figure out what this purpose is. However, there have been enough questions about the Windows Experience Index rating to justify a separate article that not only defines but explains the purpose of this function and how to find your score.
The Windows Experience Index is a measurement of a computer's capabilities. The "base score" is determined by the lowest score in a series of 5 performance tests. These test results are rated on a scale of 1.0 to 5.9. The items tested include processor calculations per second, memory operations per second, desktop performance for Windows Aero, 3D business and gaming graphics and disk data transfer rate. In order to run Aero, Window's new graphical user interface(GUI), the computer needs a minimum base score of 2. With a base score of 3.0, you can expect your computer to run Windows Aero and many of the new features included in Vista but with limited functionality. Computers with base scores of 4.0 and above can run all features with full functionality. According to Microsoft, the highest performing computers available at the time of Vista's release only received a base score of 5.
A bit of background information will help explain the idea behind the Windows Experience Index. Only a few years ago, people were buying inexpensive discount store computers then buying software these machines could not run properly. The game Doom 3, designed by hard core gamers for hard core gamers, is a good example. The typical "gamer" uses a computer with as much system memory as the motherboard can support and a high end graphics card that costs as much as the discount store computer. They then extract every last bit of performance from this machine through techniques such as "over clocking". In short, they highly modify their machines. Unaware of this, people would happily carry their new purchases home with high expectations only to be disappointed. Like buying a brand new Ford Taurus off the car lot to run the Indy 500, these people were Doomed to disappointment. This situation, undoubtedly, generated a lot of complaints and criticism. Microsoft, being the large highly visible target that they are, undoubtedly received a majority of these complaints. This resulted in a scheme for rating software and computers in a manner aimed at reducing this disappointment. The idea is, if your computers base score is 3 only buy software that requires capabilities of a base score of 3 or less. This, of course, only works if customers know the base score of their computer before buying software and depends heavily on software companies actually using this rating system.
Computer users that have been around a while, will not be excited by this at all and will mention that benchmarking computers has been going on for years. They are right. There have been dozens of benchmark programs. A single computer could pass one of these tests with flying colors and fail miserably on another. What the Windows Experience Index does is standardize benchmarking thereby making the results much more meaningful.
With the what and why questions covered, it is time to look at the how. First open your start menu by left clicking the Windows Start button. In the right hand column of the Start Menu find the "Computer" entry and right click it to open a context menu. Select the "Properties" menu choice by left clicking it. This opens the System Properties dialog.
This view of basic system information can also be reached via the Control Panel > System and Maintenance > System. This is a quick way to find the base score of your computers Windows Experience Index if you have already run the evaluation. Those that haven't run the evaluation need to click the "Performance" link in the bottom left hand corner indicated here by the arrow. On the resulting screen click "Score this computer".
Shown here is a close up view of the "System" heading of the system properties screen pictured above. The arrow indicates the WEI of the machine from which this screenshot was copied. Notice that the words "windows Experience Index" are in blue. This is a link to the same dialog that results from clicking the "Performance" link in the bottom left corner of the System Properties screen under the "See Also" heading. Should you ever update any hardware or hardware drivers, you might want to use these links to retest your computer. This machine originally had a WEI of 2.8 this score was improved after installing the newest graphics drivers.
The "Performance Information and Tools" screen results from clicking one of the mentioned links on the System Properties screen. If your computer has not yet been rated, this is where you will find the "Score this computer" link. The duration of the scoring process will depend upon the capabilities of the individual computer. The machine this screen shot was taken from ran this process in less than 2 minutes from the time the "Update my score" link was clicked. This includes the time it took for the User Account Control pop up to appear and the "Continue" button to be clicked. When the process has completed, the base score and all sub-scores will then be available for viewing on this Performance Information window.
With the original scoring task completed, the "Performance Information and Tools" screen provides the results of the performance tests in a neatly organized format. The base score is highlighted in two places and is the number to look for when purchasing software. Analysis of this information will also give you an idea of what to upgrade to provide the most improvement in your computers performance. A glance at the sub-scores shown here indicates upgrading the video card on this machine will give the best performance boost. Since the base score is determined by the lowest sub-score, upgrading the component that produced the lowest score will have the greatest impact on your computers base score.
As was mentioned earlier on this page, there are other benchmarking programs available. This site hosted a three part series on benchmarking until we recently decided to remove a few pages to make the site more manageable. Much of this information can be found on Wikipedia. Program reviews and download information can be found in abundance at BenchmarkHQ or at MajorGeeks. The three benchmarks covered on this site were CrystalMark from Crystal Dew World, Sandra Lite from SiS Software and LightsMark 2007 from Labs of Dee. We apologize for the inconvenience of those nasty "404 - File Not Found" screens that removing these pages may have caused. Analysis of our web logs shows that these pages had very little traffic. Given our limited resources and the lack of traffic generated by these pages, the space these pages occupied can be used more advantageously.
Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Windows, Windows XP and Windows Vista are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other names have been included in the above text that are trademarks of the respective companies.
