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General discussion

Win 7 and Nvidia

Oct 24, 2009 9:21PM PDT

My newly installed Win 7 Home Premium reports my Windows Experience Index fails to compute. Darn and I wanted to see if I got above 7 on the rating. I used to have 5.9 with Vista, and now it won't do it at all. This does not appear to be a big problem in doing anything but looking at the numbers but I wanted to know if mine was bigger than yours. oops my freudian slipped. Of course driver is latest, tried 3 in fact and turned off the Physx and 3D. Still no help. Nvidia 250 OC, 8 gigs RAM, Win 7, 64 bit. I suppose I can try my old video card and see if it is different. I have an 8600 in the bottom drawer.

Discussion is locked

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WEI may not recognise latest nVidia card.
Oct 24, 2009 10:21PM PDT

"I suppose I can try my old video card and see if it is different."

That's exactly what I would do...

If it works with your older graphics card, you will have to wait for Microsoft to update the WEI. Your Physx graphics card may just be "too new".

TIP: Make sure that you've done all Windows Updates, first. In theory, WU should find and install all the latest Physx Device Drivers. We mere mortals shouldn't have to do this ourselves anymore.

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another card and driver no help
Oct 31, 2009 7:11AM PDT

I tried the 8600 card and got the same results. Then I disabled Security Essentials and tried it without AV, no help there either. This is perplexing but not all that important.

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Drivers
Nov 1, 2009 8:25PM PST

Have you downloaded the video drivers from nvidia or are you using the ones that windows update uses?

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I go to Nvidia
Nov 1, 2009 11:44PM PST

Only Nvidia drivers, except I did try the one that came on disc from the card manufacturer, no difference there either.

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There's a clue.
Nov 1, 2009 11:46PM PST

Even Windows 7 may require us to find and install motherboard chipset drivers. Your post wrote "Only Nvidia drivers".

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OK
Nov 5, 2009 4:00AM PST

The motherboard is only one month old and updated all Bios and chipsets from Gigabyte website. I did neglect to add that to the adventure. But this happened today. I bought PC Pitstop's PC Matic this morning and that ran all the tests just fine. Since I saw that do the 3D tests and all the other stuff, I retried the WEI and it still failed. Oh well, whatever is causing the test to fail must be something peculiar to Windows 7 64 bit. Sooner or later some driver update will handle it.

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The final solution
Nov 5, 2009 7:49AM PST

If your games, applications, or whatever you use work fine, I just simply would give a damn about Windows Experience, to be honest I haven't ran that thing in my PC since I installed 7.
I enjoy 7, faster than my old XP (I mean it, really faster), more stable and some games run (XP gave errors in some games, those issues are past things), so, enjoy your 7 like me, and throw WE index away.
Regards.

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this bugs me to no end
Nov 20, 2009 10:13PM PST

I installed Win7 as an update and this bugged me so much I wondered if I should have taken Leo Laporte's advice and done the custom install. So, I reinstalled Win 7 as custom. Did the Windows update thing and ran the WEI, still failed, now I am getting ticked. I used MS chat help and one of the "helpers" had me do a selective startup stopping all but MS stuff. Still failed. Now the next guy sends me an e-mail that needs a reg hack in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Performance Control Panel, where I am to set the Value 1 for PerfCplEnabled. Sounds good right? Problem is that key ends at Windows with only one further branch to Internet. So then I run WinSat and while it looks like it is working and goes on for many screens, it has no effect on the DataStore or wherever it is supposed to effect WEI which has nothing in it and still fails after all of the above. Other drivers, other video cards, nothing cures this, it is like something stuck on your shoe. A reasonable person would just give this up. I would like to have someone with Win 7 HP 64, check that registry key to see if your's is the same as mine and ends with only one option after Windows. I looked thru the whole registry and could not find any PerfCplEnabled as a choice for the RHS pane.
If nothing else at least thanks for the chance to vent!

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not Nvidia problem
Nov 20, 2009 10:28PM PST

Just thought I would add that subsequent investigation has led me to believe that this is not an Nvidia problem. Testing older drivers that worked fine with Vista has fairly well proved that point.

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What antivirus?
Nov 21, 2009 1:25AM PST

A recent discussion found Kaspersky to be a cause. You can't just disable Kaspersky to see it work, you get to uninstall it.

My bet is other software can do this as well.
Bob

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no Kaspersky here
Nov 21, 2009 2:13AM PST

No Bob that is old news, I never had Kaspersky. In my previous tests I uninstalled all AV programs and that did not help either. I do have MS Security Essentials and Windows Defender now but that is all.

Can you see if your registry is different than mine?

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Where would I look?
Nov 21, 2009 2:32AM PST

That may be old news but I looked to see if that title was noted.

Is there anything lees than squeaky clean in this install? One fellow had some MSDN version and not a retail version. That one was a go back to where you got it problem.
Bob

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I think not
Nov 21, 2009 10:28PM PST

This is an Update disc that I had preordered from Amazon months ago for 49.95. Orange and had the sticker on it that had to be torn to open. No trouble with activation. Simple and obvious stuff ain't solving this.

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Here's what we know.
Nov 21, 2009 10:49PM PST

Kap AV can cause this. This means that other titles can do this too. I scanned this post for any other titles and came up short.

Try this. Go get HIJACKTHIS and make a report. RESEARCH each line and understand what it does. You may find it.
Bob

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Hijack huh?
Dec 2, 2009 8:37AM PST

I got Hijack this and read the report, didn't understand it but I read it. Anyway this problem has been overcome with a new Bios update and reinstal of Win7. Now I am all the way up to 5.5 due to my discs. Will RAID help? ah too risky for me, my last RAID 0 went south and that is why I had to do some major renovations.

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Frankly?
Dec 2, 2009 9:40AM PST

I don't suggest RAID for home use. The reasons are simple. Most don't backup and RAID is too unreliable to forgo backups.

Back to HIJACKTHIS. I use it a lot but don't claim to know everything it reports. Some items I'll know but the ones I don't I have to research. This tool is a good one to learn what your machine is up to.

Bob