Introduction
Recently Microsoft announced a bit of a climb down over its release of Windows 8.1 to MSDN developers (like me). Their previous stand was for developers to get 8.1 at the same time as commercial release.
So I’ve had a look, installing it into a VirtualBox environment…
The focus of this article is on one difference, the Windows Experience Index, mine is shown in the screenshot in the top right.
Differences?
Well yes and no. Apart from the much talked about “start” button (not) re-instatement, the control panel throws out some differences for sure (see screenshots)…
….. notably the Windows Experience Index (or Performance Indicator) (or Assessment), a Microsoft gauge of the “goodness” of your machine.
Well in Win 8.1, it’s gone! See highlight…
Or Has It?
Actually, it’s still there under the command line… All you need to do is add a switch (I chose ‘formal’ as it does the lot).
The actual file that does the work is called winsat.exe and it’s in the System32 folder. Give it a ? switch from the command prompt and all it’s inner options and usages are revealed! (see left)
So fire up your command line and run:
C:\Windows\system32\winsat.exe formal
…then watch the process stream past.
Results
There no nice GUI web report, of course. The results are still there, tucked away (as they always were) as a set of XML files in the Windows directory. Go to:
C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore
..to find them. The screenshot right shows the files I’ve just created and you’ll see that the process has just finished in the Command Line window and that it took 2min 49.59 secs to run all the tests.
Examining Results
Running all assessments has produced 7 files.
The screenshot here on the left shows the end of the CPU one.
The time it took is plainly visible along with the plainly poor CPU assessment (well it is in a virtual environment after all!!)
Conclusion
Windows Performance Index is not dead and buried in the new Windows 8.1 – it’s only been buried.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.