An odd thing I noticed about W7 & Aero

After installation you don't have to run the system rating (WEI) test in order to activate Aero. All I did was pick a theme and bang, Aero was enabled.

Maybe it's been a while since my last Vista install, but don't you have to run the WEI before Aero shows up as a display option in Vista?

 

I believe that you are correct. Now Aero is enabled purely on the ability of the graphics card and nothing else. People have tried 256mb of RAM, and Aero still worked.

I think that it's solely based on whether or not it has the WDDM driver model.

Greg

 

It's a good thing, as my WEI score on W7 is much lower than in Vista (oddly enough). With a 2.0 rating, I don't think Vista would even activate Aero....

 

Maybe the W7 WEI is much more accurate than Vista's.

I'll take a grain of salt with my Vista WEI, thank you. Haha.

 

Probably because they widened it's range on W7. Older hardware is now pushed further down the line, I'd expect.

 

I didn't have to run the system rating on any of my Vista machines to use Aero.

 

Hmmm. I wonder if Vista actually makes lower hardware go through the WEI for Aero compatibility? A coworker told me that the WEI was started automatically for him after installation, but it's been awhile for me.......

 

Hmmm, with me, Windows 7 didn't even do a WEI because of an error. I had to install all the drivers, restart the system and try again.

 

Did you get 2.0 with the disk score? There's a bug in the WEI in Windows 7, where on some disks having write caching enabled on the disk gives you an abnormally low score. You just need to disable write caching (thru device manager) before testing, and re-enable it again after

 

My 2.0 was from graphics (X200M), even though all hardware seemed to score a little lower than Vista's WEI.

 

I got 4.7 in Vista and the same in Win 7 so I don't see what the difference is?

 

Maybe because your hardware is detected as current generation, whereas mine is a few platforms old? I dunno, just throwing around theories.....

 

I can't remember if I enabled Aero first or ran a WEI, but I thought I had Aero enabled before running a WEI when I reinstalled the other day.

 

I don't think so...I dropped a whole point on my hard drive from 3 to 2 for no reason as far as I can tell its changed every time I've run WEI

 

Are you sure nothings changed? If you are running Windows 7 in a new partition of the same drive for example you will be using a much slower part of the disk then the vista install, and thus might receive a lower score.

 

I wouldn't even care about WEI scores. It's very inaccurate. I trust something like PCMark or 3DMark more.

 

I don't have to take the WEI test to allow the Aero theme option to appear. I just install my graphics driver and change the theme.

 

Its definitely changed since I've installed W7. I haven't done anything to the hard drive the number just went down.