Windows Experience Index
A new tool introduced with Windows Vista is the Windows Experience Index tool. While it has been the subject of some spirited debate, the Vista Windows Experience Index tool is a great idea for the vast majority of the population that may not be as computer literate as we would expect.
I see it all the time, people wandering into a store and picking up a piece of software, wondering if all those specifications that the software requires are inside their computer at home. In fact, my brother is a perfect example - he's not gifted when it comes to computers. He recently asked me if this game my son was playing would work on his computer. Of course I asked him what was inside his computer. He simply said its a Pentium. The short version of the story is, all he knew was 'Pentium'. He didnt know if it was a 60Mhz or 2Ghz Pentium, nor how big the hard disk was, what graphics card was inside, or how much memory it had.
And lets face it, a lot of people are in the same boat as my brother. They have a computer, they run their few applications they are familiar with, but have no idea about anything inside their computer.
And that's a example of what the Windows Experience Index tool is really for. It can help the people of the world that have little idea about the insides of their computer and for those that dont care. Also think of it in this regard, even corporations can take the values generated from this report to see if their hardware needs to be updated to run specific applications. So whilst from a first glance this appears to be a tool aimed at people to help them recognize the ability of their pc to run a particular application, it also can be of value to anyone, yes, even us administrators.
The Windows Experience Index tool runs a series of tests and then rates your computer on a scale ranging from 1 through 5 (with 1 representing the lowest possible score and 5 representing the highest possible score). Behind the scenes, it actually rates several subsets of your computer system: the CPU, ram, primary hard disk, video graphics, and gaming graphics. It then uses an algorithm (this is not just an average by the way) to calculate an overall Windows System Performance Rating or Base Score. And this is why your overall rating could easily be lower than the average of all the subset scores: the tool doesn’t simply return an overall average, but uses a completely different algorithm for generating the overall Base Score.
To run the Windows Experience Index tool, simply click on the Start button (Start Orb) and open the Control Panel. Then click on the green System and Maintenance link.
Then under the green System heading, click on the "Check your computer's Windows Experience Index base score" link.
Now when you first installed Windows Vista it already gathered information about your computer, so you will find that the Windows Experience Index tool already has calculated a score for your computer. However, if you've recently changed or added a new piece of hardware, you may find that the Windows Experience Index tool, shows the numeric score assigned to your computer in Grey.
As you can see in the above image, the tool has detected new hardware and as such, the previous score you see here of 1.0 may not reflect the true score of this computer, so we'll need to refresh this by clicking on the Refresh Now button.
So lets analyze a PC I have here. I have run the Windows Experience Index tool inside a Virtual PC 2004 Machine. This machine has 1Gb Ram, its using a 2.16Ghz Dual Core CPU on the host machine and it has 16Gb of Disk. Its biggest suspect feature is the graphics adapter which is a 4Mb S3 Card, which certainly is not capable of running games well, nor the Aero interface with Windows Vista. So lets see what the Windows Experience Index tool thinks of it.
Alright, I have a final Base Score of 1.0. Now remember, that a low score is 1, a high score is 5. Running down the Subscore column quickly, it becomes evident that the problem here is with my graphics card, which is not a true 3D card and only has 4Mb Ram, which is well below the 128Mb required to run the Aero interface. In fact, if you take all of those numbers and get the average from them, you'd be expecting a score of around 3.3, yet my base score is only 1.0. What happens here is that although I have got some very high scores for certain components, the reason that the results are not simply an average is that if you dont meet the criteria for a specific component, you cant get over the minimum base score. This is logical when you think about it, because you may have fast hard disks, fast graphics card, a blazing CPU, but only 256Mb ram - if an application requires 512Mb ram, then you cant run it, no matter how good your other components are. So the Base Score is always going to be held back by your weakest component. The solution in this case would be to get a better graphics card and my score here would go up.
You might also note that this screen also provides a link to the Windows Marketplace website where you can head off and buy software for your computer that will work on your PC, based on your Windows Experience Index Score.
Scripting your own Windows Experience Index
Now by the way, if you are a bit of a scripter and want to know how the Windows Experience Index tool extracts these values from your computer, you can do the same using WMI and use the ExecQuery method to select the instances of the Win32_WinSAT class and then wscript.echo back the WinCRSLevel property value.
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * From Win32_WinSAT")
For Each objItem in colItems
Wscript.Echo "Processor: " & objItem.CPUScore
Wscript.Echo "Memory: " & objItem.MemoryScore
Wscript.Echo "Primary hard disk: " & objItem.DiskScore
Wscript.Echo "Graphics: " & objItem.GraphicsScore
Wscript.Echo "Gaming graphics: " & objItem.D3DScore
Wscript.Echo "Windows System Performance Rating: " & objItem.WinCRSLevel
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So getting back to the "is this tool worth it?" debate, in my opinion yes. Sure it's likely to take years before we get to the stage where a person can enter their local computer store and confidently purchase software labelled "runs on a Windows Vista computer with a score of 2 or better", but its definately a step in the right direction to empower all people to manage their own computers better.
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