We’ve all experienced it: Your once light-
ning-fast PC’s performance degrades over
a period of months until it’s slower than
molasses in January. Everything creeps to
a crawl—from the time it takes your PC to
boot, to the time it takes to load apps, to
your frame rate in games. Windows Vista’s
System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) aims
to stop the mystery slowdowns forever
by including both a means of analyzing
your rig’s performance and a control panel
that will help you troubleshoot and repair
potential problems.FIRST YOU DIAGNOSE
THE PROBLEMS...
Before you start your fi rst session in Vista,
WinSAT fi res up, looks deep into your
computer’s hardware soul, and then tests
the system to see what it’s capable of. In
the beginning, it will measure your CPU’s
performance, your videocard’s speed
and capabilities, the amount and speed
of your system memory, and your hard
drive’s speed and capacity. WinSAT then
assigns each subsystem a score, from 1
to 5, based on the relative performance
of that part compared with the minimum
hardware requirements for Vista. Then,
WinSAT automatically tweaks Vista’s
whiz-bang features, even disabling some
if necessary, to accommodate what your
hardware can handle.
WinSAT not only determines the initial
confi guration for features like Aero Glass,
but it also has another trick. Third-partyapplications—think games here—will be
able to hook into WinSAT to determine
your PC’s capabilities. We sincerely hope
this eliminates the need to go into the
settings pane for every game, to manu-
ally tweak the resolution, detail level, and
other advanced features. Ideally, WinSAT
will determine that your videocard can run
with settings cranked up, that your high-
end CPU delivers enough juice to run with
3D audio enabled, and that your display
supports crazy-high resolutions.
After an initial analysis, WinSAT will
only run when it detects major changes
to your system—which likely means a
hardware upgrade—though you will be
able to force WinSAT to retest the sys-
tem from within
the Performance
control panel. As
for performance
drop-offs between
upgrades, Vista
also includes a
lightweight util-
ity—a black box,
if you will—that
measures different
day-to-day perfor-
mance metrics of
your system. It will
measure your boot
time, the time it
takes to load appli-
cations, and evengame performance. When it detects a
potential problem, the monitor utility will
notify you via a friendly message, then it
will hand off duties to the Performance
control panel for repair....THEN YOU FIX THEM
Enter the Performance control panel,
where Vista solves problems. We haven’t
had a ton of time to test the different
responses to typical problems, but we
expect that the fi nal OS will include fi xes
for most major issues.
To give you an idea of how it might
break down, here’s an example that actu-
ally happened during our Vista testing. We
were setting up a Vista test machine by
installing a series of applications. After a
reboot, the Performance monitor popped
up, told us it detected a slowdown in our
boot time, and also informed us that the
slowdown occurred after a couple of new
apps were installed. Then it presented us
with a Windows Defender panel that let
us disable the boot-time components of
offending apps. What previously would
have taken two apps (the now-unsupport-
ed bootvis and msconfi g) and a 20 minutes
to fi x, took about two minutes.
We haven’t tested the other aspects
of the OS enough to know whether all
fi xes will be this easy, but if it works as
well as it did on our test system, we’re
big fans already.“Judge not, lest ye be judged” is not a saying the kids in Redmond are familiar
with. Each Vista rig will be assigned a rating describing its capabilities.MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC JUNE 2006
Say Goodbye to Mystery System Slowdown
Vista’s integrated performance monitor promises to end system lag
Windows Defender gives you an easy interface to prevent
unwanted apps from loading with Windows.Vista Performance
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