Windows(7) Experience Index

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Truly puzzled here. I read that the Windows Experience Index for Windows 7 was now measured on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9. Vista’s scale was 1.0 to 5.9. I generated the numbers for Win7 and expected them to be perhaps a little lower than for Vista, but the results are really puzzling.

CPU: 5.3 (Vista) – 5.6 (Win7)
RAM: 5.4 – 5.6
Graphics: 3.7 – 3.7
Gaming: 3.3 – 3.6
Primary Disk: 5.9 – 3.0

This is on a multi-boot computer, same CPU, RAM, graphics card and same disk!

Small variations I can understand, but the hard disk figure really baffles me.

Has anyone else tried this experiment?

Cheers,

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“Small variations I can understand, but the hard disk figure really baffles me.”

Could be that it is reading the “System” partition which is NOT the same.

I know that on my XP and Vista system I have a lot more stuff (Hardware and Software) than I do on my Windows 7 system.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Dave, your guess is as good as any since I really have no idea what MS is measuring with their WEI. I assumed it had something to do with disk speed or transfer rate.

You say “Could be that it is reading the “System” partition which is NOT the same”. Not the same as what? If you mean that the Win7 system partition has less stuff than the Vista partition, then does it not stand to reason that the Win7 disk partition would have a higher index rating than the Vista rating instead of a lower one?

If you dual boot a Vista/Win7 system, I invite you to run the WEI on both OSes and let us know the results. I’m wondering if there may be an issue to “feedback” to MS here.

Cheers,

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Engineering Windows 7 : Engineering the Windows 7 “Windows Experience Index” has several paragraphs explaining the disk ratings with Windows 7.

Joe

--Joe

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I know or understand that you read a lot, Paul and you may have read all of these. I have not read all comments etc. on all blogs but still some links for the subject at hand:

November 1, 2008 at Ed Bott’s blog:
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=2198%5B/url%5D

January 19, 2009 by Michael Fortin at Engineering Windows 7:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/1…ence-index.aspx%5B/url%5D

January 29, 2009 by Paul Thurrott at his SuperSite for Windows:
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/ff_wei.asp%5B/url%5D

I can’t find it now, but I have seen some people mention the same thing you see, change for the disk in Windows 7 beta, perhaps in the comments at Engineering Windows 7. I can’t compare.

I agree quite a bit with Paul Thurrott; when it came WEI seemed to be like an index for customers to compare there HW with software and game requirements, something like that was it presented as in the early Vista days. But as Paul Thurrott says, and puts it very well:
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Today, there isn’t a PC being sold that can’t run Windows Aero, and of course Windows 7 runs better on lower-end hardware than does Windows Vista. It’s hard to understand, then, what the point is of continuing to measure relative hardware performance when the provided scores don’t, in fact, relay any meaningful information about the performance of your PC. When you couple this with the removal of some tools that would be quite helpful for measuring and changing PC performance–the Software Explorer from Windows Defender come immediately to mind–the continuation of Windows Experience Index in Windows 7 is all the more confusing. That Microsoft has actually spent time updating the scoring system is even more curious.

Forced to guess, it appears that WEI is actually designed primarily as a tool for Microsoft to obtain valuable data about the hardware on which Windows is run. It offers only negligible value to consumers, and has likely caused more than a few unnecessary hardware upgrades.

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But I agree with you completely that one can be curious about why a difference, apart from the changed index scale.

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Joe, Argus: Thanks for your responses. That is so much information overload that I think I’ll just grab another beer and go watch the Super Bowl (go Steelers!).

After briefly going over the links you provided, I think I can dispel my concerns by summarizing: meaningless comparisons… performance relative to Solid State Devices… changes in scoring methodologies. ‘Nuff said.

Methinks it still strange, though, that no one volunteers to post their WEIs.

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Well, they certainly pushed the limits introducing the SSDs.

I don’t run Vista, I have used it sometimes, but do not run it, so I cannot compare. You’ll have to ask, as you did, some of the dual booting fellows etc. And you don’t want to see my index for Win7 even if it was possible … 6 MHz

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Cheers,

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