The Windows Baseline

People ask me for advice when buying a new computer all the time. The machines are advertised with CPU clock speeds, hard drive and RAM amounts, Gigahertz and Gigabytes and all sorts of other jargon. But what do those numbers actually mean, what can the machine actually do?

Obviously there is some benefit to knowing the ins and outs of a computer machine, just like there is a benefit from knowing the ins and outs of a car, but not everyone has that kind of time or interest. In the end its a tool and people buy it to do a job, whether that's spreadsheets or lolcats.

The Windows Experience Index is a number assigned to a computer by the Windows System Assessment Tool. It's incredibly useful for boiling down the components of a machine and assigning them a score, and then assigning an overall score to the entire machine. The tool is available in Windows Vista, 7, and 8.

This is an example of a benchmark, and a useful benchmark at that. All benchmarks are artificial, and not necessarily a guarantee of how a machine will run in real world situations, but there is correlation. In the end you get what you pay for. If you're looking for lolcats, you can probably skimp on the score quite a bit. If you want to manipulate spreadsheets, you might want a little more umph for the numbers. And if you're trying to play the latest games, then yes, you're going to need to pay for that higher number.