Windows Experience Index: Cannot rate your computer?

Not long ago when I first run the Windows Experience Index (WEI on Windows 7) on my Computer, and after about a 10-minute run (or so), I got frustrated that Windows reported an error about hardware and that it cannot rate my system.

I tried basic efforts at that time, like updating my drivers, but no avail.

Fast forward to 6 months later. I was window-shopping for a notebook, and due to comparison, I took a look at the Windows Experience Index on some models.

When I arrived home, I got back to my old problem on how to get the WEI rating of my desktop PC to compare to the notebooks I have seen. I searched at google and read through some forums where, just like searching for a coin in the dark, I tried several suggestions for nothing.

I sat back and, maybe a bit of intuition, I decided to set the BIOS to default settings.

I ran WEI again, and alas, I got the rating finally.

Going back to the BIOS, I was really curious what setting in the BIOS that it prevented from WEI to rate my PC. After almost two hours of trial and error approach, changing settings from IDE to AHCI modes, disabling virtualization, disabing E-SATA/G-SATA, and all those other settings.

Finally, I found the culprit. JUST DISABLE QUICK BOOT. Yeah, you read it right.

Quick boot option in my motherboard seems like it skips deep RAM test, if I am not mistaken (gotta find this out when I have time).

I think WEI is so deliberate in knowing your system first before rating it, and by doing a QUICK BOOT, it may have skipped some information needed by WEI.

My hardware specs are shown below.

CPU: Core i5-750 @ 2.67 GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55-UD3P (BIOS version: F3)
RAM: A-DATA 2GB x 2 in Dual Channel
GPU: Powercolor Radeon 4850, 1GB GDDR3
Hard Disk: 320GB Western Digital Scorpio 7200 RPM
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

On my next blog, I will show (based on my experiments) that incomplete information on CPU-Z is somewhat related to WEI.

Till next blog....