Laptop Performance (24th July 2012)

Opening the Start menu, then right-clicking Computer and clicking Properties always stated 3.3 Windows Experience Index as a measure of system performance. Today I closed all other programs, clicked the score to open the Performance and Information Tools and then clicked Re-run the assessment.

Having updated the graphics drivers recently, the 3.3 it used to score for Graphics has now jumped up to 4.9! That’s the lowest score the machine has; everything else is between 5.8 and 6.2 which is a lot of power for the £530 I paid.

Well done, laptop. And well done to AMD/ATi for making their newer drivers better.

Search Indexing

At the moment the Indexing Options window tells me 163,408 items indexed. Ouch! I only ever search for programs from the Start menu or e-mails within Windows Live Mail.

Index these locations tells me the entire Users folder is currently indexed. As well as Microsoft Office Outlook and the Internet Explorer History for both user accounts. I don’t use any of that.

So tonight I unticked both of those locations. You do this by selecting the location, clicking the Modify button and then unticking the item. I had to expand the Local Disk (C:) item so that I could untick the Users folder.

Will this makes any difference? Only time will tell. Windows Live Mail seems to be the biggest HDD hog when starting up but I do search within it a few times each month.

After a short time I noticed the number in Indexing Options was falling, with the HDD making half-second bursts each second. It was politely removing items from the index. Nice! I dozed off for a while and it settled on 58,383 items index – about half the number at the start.

  1. Laptop!
  2. Received It!
  3. File Transfers with USB Stick
  4. Full Administrator Account!
  5. Installing Firefox
  6. Installing Games
  7. Reducing Processes
  8. WiFi Gaming
  9. E-mail
  10. Backups, Old & New
  11. Desk Arrangements
  12. Migrating Music
  13. Mobile Phone Archive
  14. Web Developer Setup
  15. Printing
  16. Putting Old PC Out To Pasture
  17. Stopping the Magical Edges
  18. Disk Cleanup
  19. FTPuse Integrates Seamlessly
  20. Laptop Performance