why is my hard drive score (windows experience index) so low

[bluewale]

I installed windows 7 Beta on my X60 Tablet (6366L6u, 1.6GHz, 3GB memory, 100GB 5400rpm hard drive). Before, I was using vista and my hard drive's windows experience index (WEI) was 5.2. I installed window 7 Beta (fresh install), intel matrix storage driver, intel chipset driver, and all the necessary drivers from Lenovo's website. Now, my hard drive's WEI score is a miserable 2.0. Although I feel the system is faster than vista on the same machine, i wonder what is behind this. Thank you for your inputs.

[Marin85]

I believe the general opinion for now is that WEI under Win 7 is pretty buggy, so it doesn´t really provide any substantial scores for now. I hope this will change soon with some of the next M$ updates.

[maximus_]

I have a 7K320 in a T60P and my WEI is 3.0...

[beGi]

I installed windows 7 Beta on my X60 Tablet

Well, there is your answer...

And does it really matter what WEI reports (I still don't see real use for it), especially if you noticed better performance...

[Marin85]

And does it really matter what WEI reports (I still don't see real use for it), especially if you noticed better performance...

I second that! Even under Vista SP1 WEI isn´t very representative...

[cxls]

From what I understand, the Win 7 experience index scores were lowered to reflect new hardware, particularly with SSDs coming into popularity.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/0 ... index.aspx

"...the Windows Experience Index (WEI) in Windows 7 and how that has been changed and improved in Windows 7 to take into account new hardware available for each of the major classes in the metric..."

[mgo]

I tend to be a little cynical about Microsoft's intentions as to why they even present the Experience Index. I seems that it is little more than a promotional "upsell" scheme to get users to buy more microsoft products, especially in "upgrading" to a more costly Vista operating system.

Both of the ThinkPads I have Windows 7 installed on show a very poor hard drive performance figure, around 2, as compared to 3 and 4 respectively on the same machines in Vista. (an R50p and a T60)

Windows 7 is beta after all, and the Index may be flawed and not fully written. Both of my machines run very fast, and even the once crummy copy and paste task out of Windows Explorer is now very, very fast, despite the low drive score.

[cxls]

I tend to be a little cynical about Microsoft's intentions as to why they even present the Experience Index. I seems that it is little more than a promotional "upsell" scheme to get users to buy more microsoft products, especially in "upgrading" to a more costly Vista operating system.

Both of the ThinkPads I have Windows 7 installed on show a very poor hard drive performance figure, around 2, as compared to 3 and 4 respectively on the same machines in Vista. (an R50p and a T60)

Windows 7 is beta after all, and the Index may be flawed and not fully written. Both of my machines run very fast, and even the once crummy copy and paste task out of Windows Explorer is now very, very fast, despite the low drive score.

Low hard drive scores in particular are probably due to the tuning for SSDs.

[Marin85]

I guess, as of now it´s hard to say if the new WMI scoring is buggy or simply not finished now or has new underlying concepts featuring the new technologies as well as some upcoming such. For now we could only speculate on this...

[mgo]

This is also mentioned on Microsoft Watch:

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/ ... e_you.html

[Marin85]

Interesting article! I only wonder what kind of a measure is a measure that doesn´t make things comparable

[bluewale]

thank you for all the inputs. Let's see whether Microsoft will fix this in the RTM or retail version of Windows 7. I have to say that increasing the maximum WEI score (from 5.9 to 7 something) is more logical than reducing the WEI score for the same hardware.

[beGi]

I only wonder what kind of a measure is a measure that doesn´t make things comparable

This should provide some guidelines...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement

[Marin85]

Thanks, I´m already aware of that distinction Actually, I suspected that someone would point my attention to something like this... Are you always that picky? Get some sleep BTW, as pointed out in wiki, nominal scale is not a measurement. Anyway, how could you build a measure without a (total) ordering (relation)?! (yup, it was my turn to be picky, again... )

Cheers

Marin

[beGi]

@Marin

I think WEI is in fact ordinal scale (you know the rank or performance in this case, but you can't determine the difference between scores, or value of that difference)...

It is really MS's unsuccessful attempt of standardization (for now, remember error reports in XP, useless, but there is improvement in Vista)

Regarding pickiness...well, I was always prone to it, and to make thing worse, they trained me to be even more (the curse of non-exact science, or every science when I think about it a bit more )...

[Marin85]

I think WEI is in fact ordinal scale (you know the rank or performance in this case, but you can't determine the difference between scores, or value of that difference)...

Yup, that´s my impression too, and I believe this is also the case with Vista WEI (not sure about that, just my opinion). But even in an ordinal scale I would expect from WEI to be able to tell if computer 1 is better, worse than or equal to computer 2 (that´s what I meant by comparability). To weaken things a bit, M$ may include the options "better or equal" and "I can´t say" And of course, the most important part is that the WEI output should correspond to the real facts, which by this article is obviously not the case for now with Win 7. And I don´t even want to know by how much the difference between comp 1 and comp 2 is as I have understanding for M$ how hard is to design and write an OS (I guess this activity must be very hard for them judging by the amount of bugs pro code lines ). But everything else that doesn´t meet these requirements doesn´t need to be there (as WEI or whatever they may call it) either. Just my 2 cents... To be honest, at this level what M& brought forth as WEI is nothing else but an attempt for a multi-dimensional ordinal scale since the relevant hardware parts are assessed independently of each other and not as a whole system. By obvious reasons such a beast cannot exist a priori, not to mention why the heck do they take the minimum of all 4-5 scores and pin it as the total score. It doesn´t make sense even if one assumes that all relevant hardware components somehow share a common ordinal scale...

I guess I got too excited now, but I really don´t see a reason for M$ to pay all those efforts to develop a WEI for Win 7 if they are not going to meet even the simplest requirements by common sense for such an assessment tool... Better leave Win 7 without it...


Marin

[Marin85]

Regarding pickiness...well, I was always prone to it, and to make thing worse, they trained me to be even more (the curse of non-exact science, or every science when I think about it a bit more )...

That´s good. Now we can talk...

[jjesusfreak01]

Actually, my Seagate Momentus 7200.3 gets a 5.9 in the experience index. My stock Thinkpad HDD had awful scores in Vista, and I dont expect it would have done any better in Windows 7.

[dstrauss]

Why is it that I have the same level of skepticism of the a 5.9 point "performance" scale as I do of a color coded threat level scale for security...wouldn't both be much more understandable if a standardized five or even ten point scale?

[maximus_]

My T60P with 7k320 with Vista had a HD score of 5.9 which went to 2.9 with Windows 7 Beta 1... I then switched the HDD serial connection to "AHCI"(Advanced Host Controller Interface) instead of "compatibility" in the BIOS and it went back to 5.9.. I just upgraded to build 7068 and it's still at 5.9..

****Note that with XP chaining to AHCI causes a blue screen and with Vista there is a reg fix to make it work correctly.. I was surprised that with Windows 7 that all it took was a a reboot and it picked up the new HDD drivers...****


Just in case someone tires this and the computer blue screens here is a link for Vista fix... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Here an explanation of AHCI.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_H ... _Interface

[Marin85]

Yes, Vista and for that matter Win 7 too come with some AHCI driver included, and in my experience it´s enabled per default (in case the HD is set to AHCI mode). I wonder what would disable it and cause these issues When running in AHCI mode, it´s also recommended to install Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver instead of the default Vista/Win 7 AHCI driver. My experience is that the default AHCI driver is suboptimal regarding transfer speeds, which can be fixed with installing the IMSM driver.

Cheers,

Marin

[maximus_]

My T60P came set in compatibility mode to emulate IDE so I switched it last week... I'm not sure how other Thinkpads set up by default.

[Marin85]

One for certain, those machines that were designed with the aforethought to run XP come pre default with HD set to compatibility mode within BIOS. I believe the newer models (with Lenovo Vista image preinstalled on them) come per default set to AHCI since the Lenovo Vista image includes the IMSM driver.

[maximus_]

Marin85 - do you know which Intel driver I should download? I'm finding quite a few different drivers and want to make sure I get the right one.

[GomJabbar]

32-bit: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-70477
64-bit: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-67738

[maximus_]

Cant get those to install on Win 7, it just says the driver is not compatible when I try to update it.

[GomJabbar]

See if this is any help.

http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/jw!mZZPvh.FH ... &next=1887

EDIT: Maybe you need to install the Intel Chipset drivers.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62939

[Marin85]

On my Z61p I had no problems whatsoever installing the Lenovo Vista drivers (and most utilities I use on a regular basis) under Win 7 x64 build 7000.

[Xenomorph]

You can try changing the drive's access mode or updating driver, but also keep in mind that the way Windows checks the drive was changed AFTER build 7000 / Public Beta.

For example, if you installed build 7000 and got a score of something like "2.0" on your drive, if you install build 7048, 7057, 7068, 7077, etc, the same drive may now score closer to what you saw under Vista, maybe 4.x or 5.x suddenly.