Swimming with the WEI
I found one area of Win7 that doesn't work in Virtual Box, Windows Experience Index. In Visaster its a totally bogus piece of work. It doesn't tell you enough to really tell you anything you haven't figured out on your own by the time you figure out its there. Did that make sense? No? Good. That's exactly how I felt when I first fiddled with WEI. I refuse to type the entire string again.
Turns out in Virtual Box the WEI software doesn't work. Fine, its a stupid idea anyway. Actually I shouldn't have expected it to work since it talks to hardware instead of “virtual” hardware.
Evidently there is a conspiracy of silence about the WEI. I have never seen anything about it on any websites besides Microsoft's. I have seen no OEMs or vendors touting WEI scores.
After reading (shudder!) the justification for “improving” it in Win7* I wonder why they bothered to include it at all. Maybe they were told to “Keep the same feature set as Vista” as a Win7 requirement. The only boxes that will score big on it are “gamer” systems with lots of RAM, overclocked CPUs, hyper-graphics processors with 2GB of on-board RAM and fast IO. Nobody selling computers wants to admit that Brand-X beats their pants off.
What really makes it totally freaking useless is that you can't know what it is until you get the box home, fire it up and and run it! Can I take the computer back to the store and say: “The computer you sold me sucks since it doesn't score 7.9 on the WEI. Gimme my money back!”
Perhaps users in this audience are above acting out the inner-id in public, but I have to wonder what Microsoft is thinking when they include a feature that actually could decrease the “User Experience”.
Its stuff like that, that makes Linux all the more attractive.
* http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/19/engineering-the-windows-7-windows-experience-index.aspx