welcome to the funcave

shocking news: microsoft buys enzyte…or, are you experienced?

ok…not really.

mothership has not bought your favorite product for natural male enhancement. sorry.

but your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy does have a weird story to tell about his experience with…

well…

the windows experience index aka wei.

first off, yours truly is not running the final rtm code.

in fact, he’s on rc1, which is build 5600.

that’s right kiddos.

the funcave is bereft of access to final code…

at least until the january 2007 action pack update.

and yes…

that really chaps my hide, let me tell you.

regardless…

my experience with wei has been kinda funky.

originally…

the labtop had scored a miserable 1.0 on the index.

now, for those who don’t know…

the windows experience index is a system by which vista will rank your machine to tell you whether your machine kicks ass or sucks ass.

wei scores using the following 5 categories:

• processor
• memory
• graphics
• gaming graphics
• primary hard disk

with the overall score of your machine being the lowest score from any of those areas.

since the labtop is an hp dv9005us, it has always scored a respectable 4.5, 4.5 & 4.6 in the areas of processor, memory & primary hard disk.

from the get-go, tho…it always scored a 1.0 in graphics.

not surprising considering the crappy nature of the geforce go 6150.

until about 2 weeks ago.

yours truly happened to be chatting with lady firewall, kicking over some stuff…

when the topic of new hardware & wei came up.

so as he was walking her through a couple of things in vista, including how to locate the wei, your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy happened to click update my score.

you can imagine my surprise when the labtop immediately shot up to 2.0.

you can imagine my even greater surprise when re-running raised the score to 2.2.

and finally, re-running once more improved it to 2.4.

now, obviously…

benchmarking & system performance numbers are subjective hoodoo, at best.

in the end, what really matters is…

does the system feel slow?

with full aero on…

and using the beta 2 tech refresh of outlook 2007…

using the labtop can sometimes feel like trying to sprint through a wall of molasses.

my prediction?

plenty of folks will waste an insane amount of precious & irreplaceable hours from their life pillow-fighting on the intarweb…

arguing the merits of the wei & their respective hardware choices…

which should surprise absolutely no one.

still, numbers speak louder than screen refreshes.

if the ads during your typical weekend football/basketball/baseball/golf/nascar/fishing broadcast are any indication…

there must be plenty of dudes who are interested in enhancing their hardware with just a few simple clicks.

so maybe vista will do just fine after all…

what with all the wannabe smilin’ bobs in the world.

|| posted by chris under funlab, hardware || || ||