WinSAT to Check PC Performance Details in Windows 7 or Vista

The Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) is a module of Microsoft Windows Vista which measures various performance characteristics and capabilities of the hardware it is running on and reports them as a Windows Experience Index (WEI) score, a number between 1.0 and 5.9 for Windows Vista and Windows Vista SP1 and between 1.0 and 7.9 for Windows 7 (build 7000). The WEI is due to increase its maximum score with future updates. The WEI includes five subscores: processor, memory, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, and disk; the basescore is equal to the lowest of the subscores.

Normally, WEI rating score is just a few generalized numbers (which can be manipulated) of a relative performance scale, which do not give in-depth details about the computer performance. For advanced users who want to know the very details performance ratings for each components measured by WinSAT, there is trick to display detailed performance rating scores.

To view the PC performance details with WinSAT, open Command Prompt window as administrator, and enter the following command:

winsat formal -v >> output.txt

What the command does is it will run formal assessment on all system devices or sub-components to calculate the performance benchmarks, which is also used to calculate Windows Experience Index. All performance ratings will be saved and recorded in output.txt in the current directory. Unlike WEI, the content in the output file is comprehensive and detailed.

WinSAT ships in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. The 32-bit version will not run under 64-bit Vista. It will even run on Windows XP, though due to differences in the way the benchmarks run, the results aren't really comparable.

WinSAT runs a suite of tests based on what Windows Vista does. For example, there's an encryption test using Vista's own AES encryption engine. It's important to understand that WinSAT is neither a synthetic benchmark, nor is it an application-based benchmark. It is a test of how Vista performs on specific hardware.