One of the more interesting tools that Vista is bringing is it's rating system for your machine. The system gave you a score that was supposed to be indicative of how your system ranked in terms of the "Vista experience". Many system integrators and hardware manufacturers had complaints about the system, for various reasons. Microsoft has taken the feedback gained from many of these companies and has revamped the tool, along with renaming it to the Windows Experience Index.
The tool still rates a particular computer based on its hardware components, but is now supposedly going to give a more accurate score based on how well everything works with Vista, not just how much horsepower a component has. Of course, there are still some complaints:
However, a source close to the chip giant said that it remains concerned that the tool places too much emphasis on the graphics and memory power needed to take full advantage of Vista's Aero user interface and advanced media features. "It's very heavily focused on graphics performance," the source said.
Intel isn't happy that the tool apparently doesn't properly rate systems in other areas, such as the number of cores a processor has. It's likely the tool will change again as Vista approaches release, and Microsoft has stated that the tool will evolve over time as new hardware is released. Supposedly, a machine will always get the score that it does, but newer machines will get continually higher scores. Interesting.