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Microsoft Updates Vista Assessment Tool

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

July 10, 2007, 3:12 PM

Those still considering whether to make the jump to Windows Vista will have additional help with today's 2.0 release of Microsoft's Vista Hardware Assessment Tool. The application takes inventory of a computer system and makes recommendations if upgrades are required.

Version 2.0 of the Assessment Tool is primarily designed for businesses with a large number of systems networked together. It automatically connects to each PC and acquires the necessary information through Microsoft's WMI protocol, and can handle up to 25,000 systems per domain. The tool also prepares reports displaying how many systems are Vista-ready, and assesses compatibility with Office 2007 as well. The download, when it goes live, will be available here.

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By sacaripasa

posted Jul 12, 2007 - 7:52 PM

Wait for SP1. Not worth your $$ (Expensive hardware) to be their Ginnie pig.

Score: 0

By Dsfargeg

posted Jul 12, 2007 - 6:13 PM

I don't need this crappy, highly flawed tool, I can "assess" even without it that Vista is garbage.

Score: 0

By AntiochMedia

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 2:44 PM

I get a 1.0 evaluation as I have a Mobility Radeon 7500. The rest of the computer is a Pentium 4M 1.8 with 1GB of RAM.

The way I see it is -- Vista runs FANTASTIC for me. I'm using two screens, video is fast - and well -- I understand their new graphics system takes advantage of newer video cards. That is, however, no reason to not have other teams develop other versions of that video system that use wrappers for compatibility.

I really think that Microsoft have half-assed a lot of things in Vista - even though I like it. Truth be told, they more than half-assed XP, so in no way am I making any new compliant on their behalf.

Score: 0

By FarBeyond

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 10:24 AM

The assesment tool is full of $hit...

I built my PC in March. 5200+ (fastest AMD non-Opteron at the time) 2Ghz ddr2, nvidia 8800GTs, 200GB SATA HD

Runs everything flawless (or as flawless as Microsoft can be ran)

But it rates a 5.1 (lowest score is the 2.6 dual core CPU, a 5.1? WHATEVER!)

Quad-Core wasnt out when I installed Vista Ultimate...

What rates a 10?

Score: 0

By KingMotley

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 12:15 PM

The absolute best is 5.9

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 10:29 AM

This isn't a 1-10 scale, dude.

The absolute top when Vista was initially released was a 5. You're just above that.

Nothing rates a 10 at this time.

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 12:10 PM

Still, that scale is one of the worst ideas I've seen from Redmond lately. I have lost count of the people who also saw a 5 and thought something was wrong. It was my first thought even.

Given virtually everything is now rated on a 10-point scale* by consumers, someone at Microsoft was again not paying full attention to the customer.

* We (that being marketing researchers) also know that a 5-point scale is not very psychometrically sound or valid. So, between the confusion of customers and employing a statistically invalid measure, that index can be thrown right out the window. It's pretty much useless to anybody.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 12:46 PM

Agreed, to a point.

It was a never meant as a 1-(insert random static number here) scale.

It was designed to grow as the systems perform better. Eventually, under that, there'd be a score of 57 (like Vista will be around that long).

Still, using *any* scale (relative, static, whatever) without properly explaining what it means to the customer is just bad practice.

Still, coming from a tech background, I understood it pretty easily. I don't really know how the "average" user might view it, most probably just see the number and react, so any explanation, no matter how detailed, would be irrelevant.