Microsoft's System Performance Rating is pants

According to Ars Techica, Vole is admitting that far too many punters and suppliers are getting on the blower to tell them that the system is misleading.

The System Performance Rating Tool (SPRT) which looks at all the hardware and reports the score of the weakest link. This means that an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 2GB of RAM could get a low score if it were shipped with a DirectX 9.0-compliant card with only 64MB of system RAM.

Vole's hardware partners have told it that they do not like the idea of an entire machine looking like it is useless when it only has one thing wrong with it.

Another problem is that Vole has assigned users a score so that they know what software they can run. However, as the article points out, the usefulness of these scores hinges on how software developers score their minimum requirements. It also depends on the hardware makers not to abuse the system and start labelling their boxes with a high score only to find that some other component in their system would dragging the score down. µ

L'INQ
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