Windows Experience Assessment

In these times, blessed are those who can fulfill the role expected by the consumer society and who are going to acquire or receive new electronic junk such as laptops, computers, ultrabooks and the like.

It is also the time to look for a computer friend who can give us an opinion or advice on the equipment that best suits our needs. And where most buyers are faced with a complex set of letters and figures – RAM, Gb, frequency speed, bus speed, bandwidth, transfer per second, etc. – that is, above all, confusing.

However, buyers of Windows 7 or Windows 8 systems have a reliable and quite helpful indicator for comparison, offered by the operating system itself, in the Index of Windows Experience These aren't high-resolution metrics, but they do give a clear idea of ​​the top system features we're considering purchasing.

How to get to the Windows Experience Index?

In all the versions that offer this index, which are not all as we will see later, access is very easy, whether in Windows 7 or Windows 8.

In Windows 8, the fastest method is to press the key combination Windows +X, accessing the quick menu. From where we choose System – System in English – and we are already in front of the destination screen.

If we are on a Tablet with a Window8 PRO, we will pull out the Charm bar, dragging our finger from the left edge to the right, and select Settings. Thus we can click on the PC Information icon and access the screen where the index can be viewed.

In Windows7 it is just as simple since we can access the My Computer icon, both on the desktop or from the start menu, we take out the contextual menu and select Properties. And, once again, we are in front of the screen we are looking for.

The values ​​that make up the index

The first thing we can see is the general index that always indicates the smallest value that we have obtained among the detailed indicators. Here there are differences between a Windows 7 computer and a Windows 8, since in the former the score scale ranges from 1.0 to 7.9 and in the new OS it moves from 1.0 to 9.9.

In the event that the evaluation of the user experience had never been launched, from this screen we can obtain it in a few minutes by clicking on the link that executes the tests.

In Windows 8 we have 5 components that are scored:The number of calculations per second of the processor.The number of operations in RAMThe performance of desktop graphics.Graphics performance in games.The transfer rate of the hard disk (its average speed).

In Window7 we have the same but we changed the desktop graphics performance to the performance in the defunct Aero.

Finally, in this screen of broken down indicators we can relaunch the assessment in case there are any changes in the hardware since the last system score.

Interpreting the indices

About the general index, the basic recommendation is to try to reach a minimum of 4, 0 The system in which I write these lines , an office ultrabook that limps with full-screen 720p video, has an overall score of 3.7; being especially weak in data processing. But perfectly useful for office automation, internet and even management development.

Any i5-based laptop should easily exceed these minimums, and i7-based ones should be well above 5.0. And any of them is already capable of meeting the multimedia requirements of most of the users.

If you want to go more refined, in the detailed indexes we will see that the two most important, or that have the most impact on the performance sensation, are the Processor and the Game Graphics. The first should always be above 4.0 (better 4.5), while the second should always be above 6.0.

The hard drive indicator is most of the time unimportant unless the computer uses a Solid State Drive (SSD) as it represents possibly the largest performance increase between two identical computers .

As you can see, I'm very focused on laptops because desktops are almost always superfluous, or are very easy to update. What do I have little graphic power? I put a more powerful card, more memory or SSD disks. And so all the pieces, to gain power where we need it most.

Conclusions

The less good part is that this index is not present in all versions of Windows. For example, in the Server versions it does not exist and neither, which is frustrating, in Windows RT designed to run on Tablets with ARM processors and the like.

Apart from these inconveniences, Windows offers an excellent meter for making comparisons between computers - there is even software that indicates what are the minimum requirements for its use through the user experience index - and that is somewhat unknown.

This way we have one more tool to decide which device best suits our needs and economy.