Microsoft removed Windows Experience Index in Windows 8.1. We have already seen earlier, how one could still access WEI in Windows 8.1 – but things have got a lot easier now. With this new freeware ChrisPC Win Experience Index, you can now easily get back Windows Experience Index in Windows 8.1.
If you are a Windows 7 user, go to Control Panel, open System, and you will see some rating there. That’s your system’s Windows Experience Index rating. That’s what Windows Experience Index does – it rates the system. On a scale of 1 to 7.9, WEI evaluates your processor (on the basis of the number of calculations it does in a second), Memory (operations it does per second), Graphics (basic rendering, Aero), Gaming graphics, several Direct3D assessments, and how well your hard-drive (capable of reviewing solid state drive, SSD) is doing (data transfer-rate). But interestingly, the overall score of your system isn’t the average score of all the aforementioned factors, but the minimum value it got in the previous result. On Windows Vista the evaluation is done on a scale of 1 to 5.9.
It’s a nice way to measure the performance of a system. This feature can help you with your purchasing decision as well. For instance, if you are a gamer, the evaluation score will come useful to check how well the system will perform at gaming, and whether that system is capable enough to match your needs.
ChrisPC Win Experience Index
On Windows 8.1 however, as stated earlier, this feature is nowhere to be found. For users of the said operating systems, they can use freeware Win Experience Index, an alternative to the built-in Windows Experience Index that more or less does the exact same thing.
Downloading and installing Win Experience Index gets over like a breeze. Once you are over that process, the application is ready to use. The interface of the app resembles its original counterpart. On Windows 8 and higher, the scaling is from 1 to 9.9. In order to carry out a precise evaluation, it is important that you plug-in your system to a power source, and close all the other programs.
My colleague Shyam here benches the decision of Microsoft removing Windows Experience Index and also, the alternative way to find out the Windows Experience Index manually in Windows 8.1.
You can download the Win Experience Index from here. The file size is about 1 MB.
To be fair in a lot of ways it was a terrible tool for performance measurement.