How to Increase your Windows Vista Experience Index

In this tutorial, we will show you how to increase your Windows Vista Experience Index without getting any better hardware. Just a simple hack.

What is the Windows Vista Experience Index?

Windows Vista ships with a new tool called the Windows System Assessment Tool which measures the various performance characteristics and capabilities of the hardware you run it on and reports it back as the Windows Vista Experience Index (WEI). The Windows Experience Index consists of 5 separate sub scores - Processor, Memory (RAM), Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Hard Disk. The base score is the lowest of all the sub scores and it roughly defines the hardware potential of a computer.

To view your Windows Experience Index, Just open Control Panel, click on System and Maintenance and open Performance Information and Tools. You can also access it through My Computer’s properties. To update your score, you can click ‘Update my score’.

How to change your Windows Experience Index?

The Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) calculates the WEI scores and stores them in an XML file. Updating your score creates a new XML file stamped with the date of update. To change your WEI scores, you can either buy better hardware or take the easy way out - just alter the score values in that XML file. Having a high WEI index is a geek status symbol these days and this nifty little trick can help you elevate your geek status.

Procedure:
1. Navigate to your Windows directory, then open the Performance > WinSAT > Datastore folder.

2. You may see some XML files depending on how many times you updated your WEI. Just check the date created on all of them and select the latest one.

3. Open the file properties by right clicking on it > Properties. Open the security tab and click ‘Edit’. If any UAC prompt comes, then click Allow / Yes. Click ‘Add’ and input your Username. Select the Username and tick the ‘Full Control’ option in the ‘Allow’ column. Click OK.

4. Now you can edit the file and modify it. Open the XML file with Wordpad and look out for the WinSPR tags. All your scores are saved in the sub WinSPR tags.

The contents of the file will look something like this-

<SystemScore>X</SystemScore>
<MemoryScore>X</MemoryScore>
<CpuScore>X</CpuScore>
<CPUSubAggScore>X</CPUSubAggScore>
<VideoEncodeScore>X</VideoEncodeScore>
<GraphicsScore>X</GraphicsScore>
<GamingScore>X</GamingScore>
<DiskScore>X</DiskScore>

Just edit and add your score wherever the X’s are, replacing them.
Save the file and you are done. Check out your scores through Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Performance Information and Tools.

Congratulations on your new improved Windows Experience Index.

Note: Make sure the edited scores are realistic and lie below 9.9.