Aero in Vista

[Vietster1]

I am really scratching my head on this one. My experience index is not reading properly. I have a 4.0 for gaming and 2.0 for Aero performance. This dont make sense. I had installed Vista on this machine from an OEM disk before just to see how it would work, and got higher scores, Now, I paid for it and it is only giving me a 2.0, It appears that Aero is running, I got the transparant windows and everything seems to look well, Aero is running however I am getting a low rating. Anyone have any idea why? It is a 2.93 Celeron 340, 2GB of RAM and 512 Nvidia GeForce GPU. Any suggestions?

[RicheemxX]

Damn it's been a long night, but here goes.

1. Without knowing your exact specs no one can compare results so its fruitless without posting those
2. Windows index is not a good benchmark the numbers are just meant for a basic comparison not an actual benchmark, try a good benchmark program and see where you stand
3. Did you update your drivers and everything?

[Vietster1]

Good Morning Richee. Perhaps I am jumping the gun a little. How much specs to do you need for this. It is an HP Pavilion a705w, with an MSI 6577 Motherboard, Intel Celeon 340. 2GB DDR RAM, 512 MB Nvidia GeForce 8400PCI. Running off of a slave drive 80GB, along with Windows 2000 and Windows 7(which I cannot get any benchmark from yet.) The master is a 40GB HDD Running Windows XP Home. The machine also has a 1 Terabyte SATA RAID that is used for Game and application installation. The whole mess is built into a classic Computer case, midtower, Modified with an overkill cooling system. It is powered by a 350Watt Pentium 4 designed PSU. My Index is as follows: CPU 3.8, RAM 4.2, Graphics desktop performance for aero 2.0, Gaming Graphics 4.0 HDD 3.2. The machine has the Intel845g chipset, I have installed all of the newest drivers for in from intel. The Onboard video has been disabled, it is no drivers have even been loaded for it because the OBV is not even compatible with Windows Vista Aero. So what other information do you need?

[RicheemxX]

Alright well the gpu info was all you were really concerned with so that was really all you needed to post and yeah an 8400 pci card would score pretty low. Like I said the Windows Experience Index is just a baseline its not a real benchmark its meant more for a basic comparison so don't over get overly concerned with those.

From the looks of your system and the numbers you posted your system is pretty much in-line with what should be expected. If you really want a more accurate comparison try 3dmark or something else Futuremark

[Vietster1]

Well so your saying I can play Left 4 Dead on the computer as well as just about any other 3d application pre Core 2 Duo, and I am still only getting a 2.0? for Desktop Graphics? No, that is not right, I one time installed Vista from a Dell Disk and got a 5.3 on desktop Graphics with the same card.

[RicheemxX]

What I'm saying is you are putting too much stock in the WEI, I don't know about what you got in vista but for what you have a 2.0 sounds about right for that card in the WEI for W7. W7 has a differnt baseline than Vista and your card is very low end and pci to boot!!

I get a 4.3 for graphics/aero and 5.7 for gaming with a 9600gso and that is 2-3x (if not more) the card you've got. So yeah a 2 and a 4 is about right.

[Aaron_8015]

Don't pay any attention to the PI in vista/7 people get strange results sometimes, its just a buggy hardware scanning tool...... If you are that concerned try a rescan.....

Mabye they updated the scan hardware to compensate for newer gpu's up the top end so they lowered scores for everything.....

[RicheemxX]

Damn I should have taken a screen shot, but just to make my point. My last test was two weeks ago and my base score was 4.3 (the aero test) now its 5.2 (the lowest) my hdd test. My new Aero score and graphics are both 6.7. The WEI isn't an accurate measure of your system performance, do some real benchmarks if you think your scores are off then you can compare them to similar systems

edit: but again to give you some perspective I have twice the ram, a card that is a lot faster and an oc'd e5200 dual core and you scores are about 1/2 mine as they should be.

[Vietster1]

Ok, I got things straightened out, I just reinstalled Vista. Perhaps I was a little high with those numbers, Now I am at 3.9 CPU, 4.2 RAM, 4.5 Aero Graphics, 4.3 Gaming, and 3.7 Primary HDD on my HP. I think I have a decent configuration right now, I am just wondering, I had Vista running on the slave drive, I wonder if that had something to do with it. Now it is running as the master. and only drive. If everything goes well, It will just stay as the sole OS. I had a quadraboot running, butI kind of ditched it, I just upgraded the XP that was on the Master, and formatted the other drives and partitions, Ran EasyBCD to remove all the other crap to get rid of the boot manager. so as of now, I am in the middle of updating a fresh install if Vista Home Premium. If my games run well, I am just going to stay with it for now. Though, I am looking at the 50 dollar MSI motherboard and a dual core, I am Very limited on funds, tell me if it would be worth it and would I see much of a change with my Video card, I know that the PCI can be a bottleneck, I kind of wonder somehow, why did they make a 512 MB video card a PCI if it is not capable of performing. I looked it over, I can get a cheap Motherboard and CPU for about 125.00 with shipping, would I be at all satisfied with it after running a Celery 340 on the 845 chipset?

[Vietster1]

Of course, I am going to do a little tweaking for the gaming. Though There isnt much I can really do about the HDD other than get another one and redo the whole thing. My Vaio is running Vista and it has a 5.2, though I am also kind of wondering, Where does things stand as far as the HDD score?