I think Microsoft’s heart was in the right place with the Windows Experience Index, but nobody seems to understand why it’s there. The rating really means nothing – it’s a guideline. If a game claims that it was designed for a system with a Windows Experience Index number of 4.0, and your computer is rated at 5.0, you’re set. Paul Genato asks:

I recently saw your segment on 4 GB or RAM with Windows Vista, and your other video segments which were very helpful and informative. I have another related question and I hope you can help me. I am a new Notebook PC owner and have a Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit Notebook PC with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 CPU, and a 256 MB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS video card. I am curious to know whether my Notebook PC is taking full advantage of the 4GB installed in it. One reason I ask is because of the 4.8 rating for Memory (RAM) on the Windows Experience Index which is close to the rating of a Notebook PC with 2 GB RAM, and with a similar CPU and video card installed in it. This 2 GB RAM Notebook PC turns out to have a rating also, of about 4.8. Why the discrepancy? I expected the 4GB of RAM to push the rating up to 5.5 or something like that since it has twice as much RAM. Is there something I can do to make the rating higher or make more use of the RAM available? I already followed Windows Help’s suggestion of increasing the Virtual Memory to the recommended setting of 6139 MB of initial paging size file of Virtual Memory. I increased the maximum size to 17517 MB for maximum paging size file of Virtual Memory, which was about 2 and a half times the amount of the initial size as the “Windows Help” screen suggested. I did this and the rating is still 4.8. Please tell me if this rating matters or not, and/or if it is accurate.

I am now running a tuner card to watch HDTV, I have open several internet pages, have a movie trailer for my Windows DreamScene desktop background running, and am running one or two applications at the same time without any hang ups. While I do this my task manager shows that 2.47 GB of RAM is being used. If I had this same set up having all those same applications running with 2 GB of RAM would my system start bogging down or crashing, or would it still just perform as smooth as it is right now? I wonder about that since the Windows Experience Index has around a 4.8 rating for a 2 GB RAM Notebook PC too. I hope you can tell me your take on it, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

Hey, at least you’re running smoother than you were before!

• Windows Experience Index