This idea comes from one of the awesome engineers I work with, Chris Tester. We’ve recently updated our laptops to Windows 8.1 and Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have removed the old Windows Experience Index page. Not that WEI was anything fantastic but it did give a nice easy way to compare computers without having to go through installing a third-party testing package. I can only speculate that they thought it would be a bad idea to show this on tablets? Or did the OEMs not like it?
Anyway, it turns out that the underlying tool for WEI, WinSAT lives on! This is good news as it means the Win32_WinSAT class will still be updated with the correct values. So to get this little functionality I’ve written a (rather long) PowerShell one-liner that displays the WinSAT values as per the old WEI names using expressions.
For those looking to go further with PowerShell I think this would be a good tool to try some different things. Just a few things off the top of my head:
- How about running this against a remote computer?
- How about running it against LOTS of computers? Would you change anything, would your previous attempt scale?
- The WEI used to have descriptions of all the fields, how about using a custom PSObject to make it look even more like WEI?
- Unfortunately you can’t force a WinSAT run using WMI but you can using the winsat formal command, how would you integrate that functionality?
Good luck!
