The so-called “Windows Experience Index” has been helping us decide, since Windows Vista, which parts of a PC configuration are the strongest and which ones need new hardware to improve. From Windows 8.1 onward, this internal Windows benchmark is missing in action, but the Winaero WEI Tool can bring it back on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
Continuing with what we might call “benchmark Monday,” we should recall the Windows Experience Index. From a technical standpoint, the experience index is the final score Windows assigns to our hardware, to gauge how well the operating system will run on it. The background tool responsible for running the tests is the Windows System Assessment Tool, better known as WinSAT. Its journey began in 2007 with Windows Vista, and it gained relevance by helping users verify whether Windows Aero could run decently or if it would bring the computer to its knees. This assessment received updates in Windows 7 and Windows 8, but with the arrival of Windows 8.1, it vanished into thin air.
Although there are technical reasons for its removal, users interested in this assessment can bring it back using a small application called Winaero WEI Tool. Basically, it replicates the Windows Experience Index interface and activates all relevant benchmarks to generate the score for each case. This is possible because WinSAT still exists in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 — only you can’t access that tool directly. The old methods required running advanced commands through PowerShell, but Winaero WEI Tool removes that need completely.
Now… some details. Earlier I mentioned “technical reasons” for dropping the score, and one of them is that the results aren’t complete under Windows 10. For some reason, Microsoft no longer calculates performance scores on 3D graphics, which forces the result to always be 9.9 due to the hard-lock. That decision makes the numbers slightly inflated on Windows 10, but since the final score is set by the lowest test result, it’s not a big deal.
