lower Windows Experience index after clean install

Well my Upgrade DVD finally arrived from CompUSA after 3 weeks, so I did the clean install which worked flawlessly on my modest V6500Z. So, I'm happy that I have most of my drive space free for myself. For now I have the Home version of Avast installed which assumedly is less of a resource hog that Symantec/Norton AV. However, my WEI went from 3.0 to 2.6, with the low score being the gaming graphics score in both cases. I'm somewhat confused. I just read a post in Orev's clean install thread that implied that HP uses a custom or specially optimized version of Vista on their laptops. Is this true? It's not a tremendously big issue; I'm still happy with my laptop (my 1st) and I don't do any newer games or intensive graphics stuff. But I like to try and optimize my hardware to get the most out of it. I've tweaked what I can in the Nvidia control panel for the 7150M integrated graphics controller and have gotten the Aero score up to 5.4 from 3.1, but the gaming won't budge from 2.6. Is it a custom OS that I lost doing the clean install or am I missing something? I have re-installed all the drivers and critical windows updates from the sw-setup folder that I backed up beforehand. The driver is pretty recent: dated 9/07/07 I believe; I tried to install one of those souped up drivers from LaptopVideo2Go, but it crashed during the install. Any thoughts?

Thanks!
yock1960

 

the laptopvideo2go drivers should definitely fix that
make sure you follow ALL of their directions and guides

 

I had a WEI of 2.9 using laptopvideo2go drivers before the clean install

After the clean install it was 2.7 but the performance was noticably faster

WEI is not accurate. I remember when i was trying different drivers it made it go to 2.9 and after i rolled back the driver to the previous, it was still 2.9