Vista Grades You With The Windows Experience Index

Jason Chen — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:40:33 EST

Vista ranks us at 3.7. We blame it on our graphics card. You see, Vista gives you an "experience score" based on your components in your system, which is supposed to give you a good idea of how well Vista will run. In our upgraded XP to Vista system, Vista gave us a 3.7 because we only had a Radeon 9600 with 128MB of RAM.

So what do these scores mean?

A 1 means you should just seriously go back to XP. Microsoft wants your money, but not that badly. A score of 2 is the basic score you'll need to do anything on Vista worth while. A 3 (which is what we have, a high 3) is going to be the "value end", or super cheap, PCs being shipped into 2007. A 4 is a mid-range machine, and a 5 is a high-end monster that can do Aero-Glass on multiple monitors and hack into the Matrix.

The current maximum score is a 5.9. A 6 hasn't been defined yet, because Windows developers want to leave themselves room for a 4-dimensional Pipes screensaver or something. They plan to re-evaluate the scale every 12-18 months, or else in two years everyone will have machines that score a 4 or a 5.

In our experience, that 3.7 is pretty decent. Sure, the CPU could be faster, but we haven't noticed any slowdown thanks to Aero. We're not disappointed, since the performance is about on par with XP and this is a pretty low-end machine, after all.

And for you nerds? You can hit up shareyourscore.com and see what other nerds are getting with their machines. It's like an e-penis competition graded by Microsoft—the king of making e-penis competitions (Xbox Live Gamerscore points, for example).

– Jason Chen

What the scores mean [Vista Blog]

Share Your Score

July 17: No-Photography Day

Charlie White — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:17:40 EDT

Today is National Camera Day, no kidding, and being the contrarians that we are, we present an alternative view of this snap-happy society. For those who think something didn't really happen unless they've taken a picture of it, an English photographer is urging people to step away from the camera and experience the world with their own eyes on "Non-Photography Day." Becca Bland is trying to publicize July 17 as the day when people put down their cameras and appreciate the moment.

"Experience life in an unmediated fashion, without anything in front of your eyes. Live in the moment. When you simply take photos of something, without fully engaging with it, you're assuming that all you can have and take is the actual appearance of a place — rather than other creative factors that exist in the place."

To insert a personal anecdote, I once covered the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger for a news network, and after the launch was finished, I realized that I hadn't really watched it—I had seen it through the viewfinder of a camera. To this day, I wish I would have just locked down that camera and simply watched the launch with my own eyes. I could have experienced reality, first-hand. However, the other reality would have been losing my job for missing the shot. Readers, similar experiences? Does taking pictures of an event detract from your experience of it? – Charlie White

Photographer urges no-photo day [BBC News]

Gizmodo: experience

Vista Grades You With The Windows Experience Index

July 17: No-Photography Day