I still believe that XP is the best Windows operating system however my main laptop has Vista and my new HP 2133 laptop has vista installed too. Whilst my main laptop (Asus G1S) has a 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, my new portable laptop has a miserable 1.6GHz Via 7 processor. It really should have XP installed instead of Vista but unfortunately HP didn’t think so.
I’ve been reading a lot of tips and tutorials on Vista the last few days and I have learned a few tricks to improve performance. I’ll post these tips in a few days but today I want to talk about the rating system Vista has.
Vista is able to rate how powerful your system is. The rating is called the Windows Experience Index.
My main laptop has an index score of 4.7
My new portable laptop has a measly score of 2.0. According to Microsoft this means
A computer with a base score of 1.0 or 2.0 usually has sufficient performance to do most general computing tasks, such as run office productivity applications and search the Internet. However, a computer with this base score is generally not powerful enough to run Windows Aero, or the advanced multimedia experiences that are available with Windows Vista.
The range goes from 1 to 5.9 so my main laptops score of 4.7 isn’t too bad. According to them
A computer with a base score of 4.0 or 5.0 is able to run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality, and it is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multiplayer and 3 D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content. Computers with a base score of 5.0 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released.
If you use Vista you should check this out. To see your index all you need to do is open up your control panel (not classic view), choose ‘System & Maintenence’ and then ‘Performance Information & Tools’.
So what’s your score?
:)