Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on February 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Windows Vista has a feature included that ranks your hardware on a scale from 1 to 5.9. It is called the Windows Experience Index (WEI) and the better your hardware is the higher your score will be. It analyzes your processor, memory, graphics, gaming graphics, and primary hard disk to provide you with your overall score.

The overall score, which is referred to as the base score, is only comprised of the lowest subscore from the items mentioned above. A post was started in our forum a few weeks ago asking what everyone’s Windows Vista Experience Index was, and from the looks of it the highest value you can get is 5.9. As OldManDeath pointed out in the forum the maximum WEI score will continue to increase as better hardware makes its way to the market:

Considering how often computer technology changes, you may wonder how rating values will change as new hardware capabilities become available. So that the score you see today has the same meaning at any point in your computer’s lifetime, Microsoft will increase the top end of the rating scale as new hardware innovations become available. For example, the top end of the WEI score range by this time next year might be 8.0 instead of the current 5.9 to accommodate the availability of more advanced computer hardware. So, if I happen to still be using the same computer at that time without having made any hardware changes, my base score would still be 2.2.

Microsoft has a set of benchmarks that it obviously follows when testing your hardware to rank it. Better performance will result in a higher WEI score. What if you could know what hardware ranks up at the top? This might help you pick out hardware the next time you’re in the market to purchase a video card or processor.

ShareYourScore.com is a site where you submit the file that Windows creates when analyzing your system’s hardware performance. The file that Vista creates is a simple XML file that could be modified by anyone to provide false information, but the cool thing is that the file includes the name of your video card and processor so that they can rank them. You can also lookup your current graphics card to see what detailed statistics have been received by other submissions.

Right now there doesn’t seem to be a lot of software that makes use of the Windows Experience Index, but I’m sure they will start to emerge. Games can especially benefit from this because they will be able to know what a user’s hardware is capable of handling, and adjust the quality to optimize the performance. Give it some time and I think this could turn out to be a great thing.

Source: Connected Internet

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