Before you buy, know your WEI

Burn that little saying in your brain.  Have you ever purchased something you never were completely satisfied with?  I made my first major mistake on a Chevy truck.  Not because it was a Chevy, but because I cut corners and instead of getting the V8 I wanted, I opted for the V6 to save a few bucks. 

The problem with that purchase was that it was a direct factory order.  I didn't test drive it because all of the trucks on the dealer lot were V8's.  It was one of those Chevy Silverado Extra cabs.  Loved the truck, but the V6 was just too sluggish on that large a truck.  I sold it and got the Chevy short bed with a V8.  Now that was a fun machine. 

I bought a Dell Latitude D820 with the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120M video chipset.  That was another mistake I made.  I need better graphics performance than the D820 delivers.  Of course at the time, I didn't have any way of knowing how the video chipset would perform with Windows Vista Aero Glass.

The first Vista Ultimate build I installed last year scored a 3.1 Windows Experience Index (WEI).  I figured since we were still three months from shipping Windows Vista, it was a driver issue.  The WEI with the shipping Windows Vista driver was a 3.1.  That driver wasn't very stable and NVIDIA and Dell released another version of the driver a couple of months later that improved the stability but there was no improvement in performance.  Now I was getting worried.  What if it isn't a driver issue?

Today, Dell and NVIDIA released their latest and presumably final version of the driver for this machine since it is no longer made.  As you can see to the right, there has been no improvement in performance.  In fact, this is the best they expect from this video chipset. 

So how do you prevent this from happening to you? 

Do your homework, or better yet, don't buy anything where the maker won't publish the WEI score.  How is this score created?  The WEI score is generated by winsat.exe.  The Windows System Assessment Tool (WSAT) is a tool that is run at Windows Vista initial setup and can be run manually by the user of the system.  Developers can also use it as a means to generate performance data which can be used in a variety of ways.  I would like to see the online buying websites display WSAT WEI score data based on configuration choices.  This would be a pretty simple provisioning addition.  If you want more information on WSAT, see the slides on the subject.  The bottom line, you won't know what your purchase experience will be like unless you have some standard data measurements from which to compare and make an informed choice from.  I didn't last year but I won't do that again.  Neither should you.

Screencast

See mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/inetpub/keithcombs/p26WindowsExperienceIndex.wmv for a screencast on the subject.

 

[UPDATE]  A question came my way from another Microsoft employee who I've know for years.  Kevin asked, "For a business machine, why do you need/want > 3.1 for the graphics adaptor?"  Good question. First of all, before you even need to consider the usage by applications you need to consider the overall performance of Windows Vista.  Then on top of that you need to consider what applications you plan to use.  For instance on my Intel T2500 based D820, the Vista inbox driver and the driver released in January was sluggish enough to make scrolling a page vertically in IE7 annoying.  Pile on business graphics from Excel or other resource consumers, and before you know it things are bogging down.

Now granted I'm not a typical business user, if there is such a thing.  I typically run multiple operating systems via Virtual PC, demo this, demo that, so I'm taxing the hell out of a machine.  Ultimately you are the final judge of what the application mix is, but the reason I am pointing out this index is because over time, you'll learn to judge a potential purchase from these data points.  If your application mix runs fine on Windows Vista with a 3.1 WEI, kewl beans.  If not, you'll start to ascertain your minimum bar.

The real question is how to force the PC makers to start revealing this data.  Only you can do that.  Make the information a stipulation for purchase.  Dollars talk.