Windows 7: Do You Know Your WEI?

Today’s post is a guest post by Daniel Offer, owner of the Facebook download Chit Chat for Facebook.

He recently wrote Facebook articles on Facebook Status Tips and Facebook on the Blackberry.

In Windows 7, Microsoft has made it possible to compare the performance of your computer against a common standard. It’s called the Windows Experience Index, or WEI. This article will explain why it might be useful to know your computer’s WEI and show you where to find it.

Have you ever looked at the list of hardware requirements on a box of software and been completely baffled as to whether your computer met all of the requirements on the list? Even techies can struggle to remember all of those numbers if they have more than one computer to deal with. Well, here comes the WEI to the rescue.

The whole idea of the Windows Experience Index is to give you one number to remember for each computer. The WEI is generated by evaluating the performance of a computer’s CPU, memory, graphics processor, and primary hard disk. Windows 7 will then take the score of the lowest performing component and assign that as the computer’s WEI.

Software companies are now expected to determine the lowest WEI score their software will work with and put it on their packaging along with the hardware requirements. Then, you just have to compare their WEI with yours.

Here’s how you can find your computer’s WEI:

1. Click Start.
2. Right-click Computer.
3. Select Properties. Your System window should open and display a white number on a blue background in the middle. That is the computer’s WEI:

The phrase in blue, “Windows Experience Index,” is actually a link. If you click it, you can view the individual scores of the key system components from which the WEI was derived:

If you’ve made any key hardware changes since the date of the last update shown at the bottom (or don’t yet have a WEI), you should re-run the assessment (click the link in the bottom right with as few programs running as you can manage).

You can see in the image above that the WEI was determined by the lowest score, that of the primary hard disk. This will normally be the case unless one of the other components is much older.

If you have a component that scores lower than the primary hard disk, or is significantly lower than you think it should be, you might consider upgrading that component and re-running the assessment.

Knowing your computer’s WEI can help you in two ways: it can help you determine if you can run a new software package, and it can help you identify key system components that you might want to upgrade. So what’s your WEI?