The screaming 320GB hard drive in my new Sony VAIO laptop has me screeching. Thank you Windows Experience Index.
I just got the computer a week ago Friday—and it was an expensive purchase. A friend and I swapped some gear, for which he got my older 15-inch MacBook Pro (2,4GHz processor and 4GB RAM), which offset most of the VAIO's $1,999 price. The WEI, as rated by Windows Vista: a respectable, but not great 3.8. Windows 7 Beta 1 WEI: 2.0.
That's right, as I tweeted earlier today: "My new VAIO laptop had 3.8 Windows Experience Index under Vista. It gets a 2.0 under Windows 7. Because of the hard drive. LOL. But, of course, I'm not laughing at all. I'm not crying, either. There is a reason specific to Beta 1.
My swapping buddy rang this morning, and I told him about the 2.0 rating. His immediate reaction: "That's a thousand dollars a point."
I checked the WEI because of a new post at Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 Weblog. I can't tell you how good the rating makes me feel about my new computer.
"Somebody showed you that it's not as shiny a penny. There's a shinier penny," my friend said. He's right. I'm more satisfied running Windows 7 on this laptop than any other with Windows Vista. But there's this psychological thing, of going from a three-eight to a, ah, two. It's not a good feeling, but it's not one likely to last. Gulp, hopefully.
According to today's E7 blog post, Microsoft has temporarily capped the rating for some hard drives. There are some issues related to caching that affect WEI scoring. Microsoft's Michael Fortin explains:
To reflect this real world learning, in the Windows 7 Beta code, we have capped scores for drives which appear to exhibit the problematic behavior (during the scoring) and are using our feedback system to send back information to us to further evaluate these results. Scores of 1.9, 2.0, 2.9 and 3.0 for the system disk are possible because of our current capping rules. Internally, we feel confident in the beta disk assessment and these caps based on the data we have observed so far. Of course, we expect to learn from data coming from the broader beta population and from feedback and conversations we have with drive manufacturers.
source: microsoft-watch.com.
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