Vista experience index base score of 5.3

:Windows experience index base score: Hmm...

I didn't know about this thingie, nobody seems to be talking about it while discussing Vista. Well, not many are talkin about Vista in the first place so the chances of mention of this thing would be remote.

So. I got the score of 5.3 with subscore as follows

Processor 5.5
Memory(RAM) 5.9
Graphics 5.9
Gaming graphics 5.9
Primary Hard Disk 5.3

This is with the AMD 6000+ Processor running at stock speed of 3000Mhz.

Now i cant do much about the HDD score.(WD 250 GB PATA) so i decided to play around with the processor clock speeds.

With the processor overclocked by 5% 3150Mhz. the processor score stayed at 5.5.
Overclocking by 10% 3300Mhz The processor score moved to 5.6. SS as below

Since the Vista Base score is the least score out of the component scores, i got the Vista base score of 5.3. How to get the HDD score to move up is not known to me right now but i'm sure i'll be able to do that once i get two SATA HDD to run in RAID 0 configuration but thats still a long time to go.

This overclocking was done from the BIOS menu directly without spending much thinking effort on it. Short of time and will. Just wanted to try out the effect.

I'm sure when i get some time to spend on tweaking the clocking values and the cooling subsystem. I'm planning to get a peltier junction to have the best localised cooling for the processor. Then It will be fun to overclock and to extract performance out of processor.

I would love to know the maximum score of components. But since the scoring is capped at 5.9 for some time atleast (Could take a long time for Vista to gain acceptance with XP still being OK and Vista not offering any visible benefits) i'll just have to wait.

Any hackers around to unlock the scoring???

Crysis Demo

I was looking since many days for a way to find the limits of my system. Quake 4 and Doom 3 don't really seems to bring the system to its knees as the saying goes.

So I installed the Crysis Game demo version from this months PC world. It say its a DX10 game and is really kick ass. Lets see I said.

The demo itself is a big one . We used to have full games smaller than this just last year or so . The demo is 1.7 gigs. Somehow I cleared some space for the game and installed it. Currently I am running Vista and the Vista comes up with a question everytime something happens. Dumb OS. Game requires some hotfix to be installed before it can be played. MS came up with a substandard OS and doesn't like people cribbing about it. No wonder people don't want to move from XP which has matured with the old bugs addressed(and new ones added).

After the install i found there was no shortcut installed by it in the start menu. So I went to the installation directory and found it. There were some benchmarks in it so i tried them. Good for us lazy ppl who want to see some action without much input.

The bench mark scenes look extremely good and really nice detailed graphics are there.

The game looks good . Haven't played it yet. Should be fun.

The nice things about the benchmarks is that you can escape into the control panel of the game and change the video/game/audio setting for the game. This helps you come up with proper settings giving playable framerates for your machine.

In the scene where our guy is running around destroying things the details can be realy noticed once you start enableing various video options. AA seems to reduce the frame rate most. With AA turned off I got the scene to move at a animation like speed. With Max AA scene became a slideshow.

download Crysis demo
requirements for the game
Official site

Moving the computer

Today I moved the position of my computer. The table under the computer is the folding type and ther is very little space there. The legs take up all the space(of the Table). I had a hell of the time to work( ;) ) . with the legs getting cramped(mine).

So twas time to realign the orientation of the computer with respect of the table. I mean to change the position in such a way as to make the experience more WOW.

So I changed the computer position to be aligned to longer edge of the table. This was done with the computer still on and the entire operation was done so as to not break the net connection.

Here the decision to buy an UPS was fruitful and thge entire thing was completed properly.

Some day I need to check the backup time from my Microtek 1kVA UPS. The shopkeeper/the manual says that it should be able to suport a single computer for nearly 40-50 minutes but cant really believe that can I? That is similar to believing hte milage figures of the vehicle given in its advertising flyer.