Microsoft has reworked the PC assessment tool in Windows Vista after fielding complaints from hardware makers – but the changes may not be enough to completely quell concerns. In May, the software maker promised to make changes to the Windows System Performance Rating tool, which aims to assess how capable a machine is of harnessing the upcoming operating system’s new features. Critics were unhappy with the way it presented scores and how it came up with its ratings.
Yeah, you’d think that your final score would be the average of all the individual scores that you got, but it’s not at all.
I still say they should wait until at least next July, possibly August, to release.
I was very confused the first time I installed Vista Beta 2. Every component on my system was almost a 6 (5.8, 5.9, etc) except the hard drive because I only partitoned Vista to get 50GB of space. The hard drive rating was a 4, and the “Overall Rating” was a 4. I was like, “huh?” Silly tool only useful in continuing the myth that people need more computer than they have. I maintain that the vast majority of people (everybody not playing 3d games, doing video editing, or doing 3d editing) need no more than a 1-2GHz system with 512MB of RAM running Windows 2000 or Linux. I used to love it when Intel ran ads saying that for peak photo management performance one should get a top-of-the-line Intel Pentium 4 with HyperThreading. As though photo editing needs that (unless you’re talking Photoshop with multiple 8+MP images, which they weren’t). Advertisement conspiracy!
Yes…
I, on a daily basis, fight the urge to buy a dual-core system.
I do play games, but not that much, and not even the latest and greatest. Not to mention my system can already handle the latest and greatest, though games like Oblivion would strain the system…
Why exactly was this comment voted down?
Goodness gracious, whoever did that REALLY needs to do something else with their life.
You’re better off getting a great video card. My 3200+ handles oblivion fine, but I’ve got 2gb of ram and an overclocked 7900gt. For me dualcore would make sense, I do Photoshop/Illustrator and on occasion 3d-rendering for most of my computer use. Daily. But the best thing I did was get 2 gig of ram fixed all my oblivion problems and solved huge slow downs in illustrator and photoshop, could always use more though, illustrator really hogs ram when you load 100 meg TIFFs and then proceed to apply raster effects to vector objects on top of it.
Dual core will probably will be my next purchase if one of those fancy DSLRs and some nice lenses don’t catch my eye first…
The overall rating makes sense. It’s based on what the bottleneck in your system is. How about a system like this:
Athlon X2 4800
600 GB RAID 5
GeForce 7800
64 MB RAM
As long as you’re stuck with 64 MB RAM, no amount of other components will make Vista usable. If you don’t give the overall rating based on the bottleneck, you end up giving a score that makes a system like that look really good.
And you can imagine why the HPs, Compaqs, and Dells of the world are unhappy with this system …
Pentium D 940 – high score
300 GB SATA2 HD – high score
1 GB of DDR2 – high score
Intel Extreme Graphics with 128 MB shared – oops
Overal score – oops
need no more than a 1-2GHz system with 512MB of RAM running Windows 2000 or Linux.
I remember reading more than one article in the late 1990s about how the average user doesn’t need anything more than a 200 MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM running Windows 98. Of course, such a machine is useless now. In between then and now, things changed. People started doing photo editing, playing HD trailers, ripping CDs and DVDs, etc. The OS got fancier, with protected memory and true multitasking, anti-aliased graphics, double-buffering, etc.
You don’t *have* to do these things. Not having anti-aliasing won’t kill you, and tearing during window movement isn’t the end of the world. But with hardware being as cheap as it is, why bother with an impovrished user experience?
It’s a ruddy number at the end of the day. If you take this as advice to upgrade your machine you need help. Vista is the problem, not your hardware.
Dual cores are for servers and high end processing (audio/video). Most people don’t really benefict from a dual core processor if you take in account the money spent on it. When the time comes that all processors are dual core and the same price, then it will be like now with 64 bit processors.
Last version I tested on vista which was past B2. It crahsed the explorer 100% if you try to enter c: ( where c: is the installation drive), and all file permissions on that drive was locked even to administrators with cmd tool. I was not able to replace a file on that drive even on cmd tool, where it gave me permission denied.
Vista version was : 5456
Commands unexecutable:
1. “mkdir new”
2. “icacls *.* /GRANT Administrator:D”
3. “xcopy *.*”
4. “runas /user:administrator cmd” with no password prompt
Concerning performance tool it gave me alot of different numbers on different builds and some of these were wrong due to bad detection of hardware, besides it doesn’t give you any performance clue on:
1. Sound Cards which can offload CPU and thus mark it with high number
2. HDD which also can offload CPU like in case of SATA drives with command queing or real SCSI drives with dedicated CPU/memory on the SCSI card. So HDD value seems to come from how much space is availble to Vista
3. Network, which doesn’t give you higher values when you use 1 Gbps, which is an important performance feature on local networks.
It just seemed sensible to me to have their system rating point out the bottleneck in your system regarding to performance of the OS.
For once I’m siding with Microsoft. The rating made sense because it told you just what you needed to improve.