How to find your Windows 7 System Rating

How fast is your computer really? Can you be sure that Word is loading in half the time that it used to, or are you simply imagining it? If only there was a benchmark tool built into Windows which allowed you to se things.

With Windows 7, and also Vista, there is a quick and easy way to run comparitive tests on your machines, weighted to Microsofts own algithms, to guage just how fast your machine is performing - and giving you a good benchmark to check the effectivness of updates, or simply to have a little competition with your friends.

The system rates the perforance of you machine in 5 key areas, Processor, Memory, Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Hard Disk Speed (primary only). It then gives you a score of 1.0 to 7.9, with 1.0 being the lowest. Windows then takes your lowest subset score and uses this as your "Machine Rating". This is useful for determining which "Games For Windows" games will run on your machine, but not a whole lot else.

What is useful however, is taking each subset score on their own and comparing them before and after upgrades, or simply to play Windows Trumps with a friend.

To get your systems rating you can either:

Navigate to Your control Panel, and then to "Performance Information and Tools"

or

Click on the Start Menu, Right Click "Computer", Choose "Properties" and then Click "Windows Experience Index".

It's then just a matter of Running the Assessment (in the lower right corner) sitting back, and waiting for the test to run. It is alys a good idea though to turn off any defragmentation, games or Anti-Virus whilst the test is running so that you get a fair reading.