The Windows Experience Index benchmark tool has been around in Windows since Microsoft first introduced it in Windows Vista. For those of who are not familiar with the tool, what it essentially does is measure your PC’s performance and breaks it down into five main categories: processor, memory, graphics, gaming graphics and hard disk.
The Windows Experience Index isn’t really known to accurately measure the performance of PCs, but if you’re comparing your system with other PCs, it can be quite a useful tool to identify hardware deficiencies.
Starting with Windows 8.1, Microsoft decided to remove the graphical interface to the Windows Experience Index. What this essentially means is that this isn’t available in Windows 8.1 anymore:
The underlying benchmark utility which measured the PC’s performance is however still available in Windows 8.1. This utility, known as the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT), can be used to find your PC’s performance; you just need to type a couple of commands from the command line.
1. Open the command prompt as administrator. For those of you who don’t know how to do this, simply right-click the utility, and select “Run as administrator.”
2. Once your Command Prompt is open, type in
winsat prepop
and press Enter. This will run the benchmark and store the results on your PC as XML files. Depending on your PC processor, this may take anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes.
3. Once that’s done, open the Windows Powershell as administrator.
Once it’s open, type in
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_WinSAT
and hit Enter on your keyboard. This will analyze the results in the XML files we created earlier, then present them as scores for each category.
Here’s what everything actually is:
- CPUScore is the score for the processors on the PC.
- D3DScore is the score for the 3D graphics capabilities of the PC.
- DiskScore is the score for the sequential read throughput on the system hard disk.
- GraphicsScore is the score for the graphics capabilities of the PC.
- MemoryScore is the score for the memory throughput and capacity of the PC.
That’s it. If you’re looking for your base score, look at the number next to “WinSPRLevel”, which is just the lowest score of the five categories.
Shujaa Imran is MakeTechEasier’s resident Mac tutorial writer. He’s currently training to follow his other passion become a commercial pilot. You can check his content out on Youtube
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