A great tool that you can find in Windows Vista that allows your computer to scan itself and see what aspect of your computer is slowing it down is called the Windows Experience Index.
The Windows Experience Index measures the capability of your computer’s hardware and software configuration and expresses this measurement as a number called a base score. The higher the base score is on your computer the faster your computer will run, so if you require a computer to do multiple or resource-intensive tasks you will need a much higher base score than someone doing basic word processing.
To run a Windows Experience Index on your Vista run computer, simply follow these points;
1) Go to your windows explorer and right click on computer, now click properties.
2) This will open a page that has View Basic Information About Your Computer at the top
3) Now if you look down to Rating you can see if your computer has been rated.
4) If your computer is unrated then you need to click the Windows Experience Index: Unrated button.
5) You will now be on a page called Rate and Improve Your Computer’s Performance
6) Simply click Rate This Computer to run a Windows Experience Index scan
7) Note: The scan may take a few minutes
8 ) When the scan is done you will be back on the Rate and Improve Your Computer’s Performance page, but with a base score of your computer.
9) You have now finished your Windows Experience Index scan and will be able to use your Base Score.
Your Base Score is not an actual average of all your scores, it is just the lowest of all the scores. So as you can see from the images above (a little hard to see), my Gaming Graphics scored 3.1 which was the lowest so my whole Base Score becomes 3.1.
With this base score you can now work out what may be slowing down your computer, and what you need to improve your computer. As I never play any games (apart from the odd game of solitaire) I do not require any new graphics card to improve my Base Score, but I have a Memory score of 4.7 which means my day to day usage can be of a fast speed.
If you do need new software for your Vista computer then you can now use your Base Score to be confident the software will work well. Before you purchase any software you can check that it requires a computer with a sufficient Base Score of your own computer. That way you will always get software that runs fast and able for your computer.
