This tip is for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The Windows Experience Index is a performance measurement that can be used to judge how well a PC will run Windows. The value of the index starts at 1 to 5.9 for Windows Vista and 1 to 7.9 for Windows 7 and 1 to 9.9 for Windows 8. The higher the score the better performance you can expect from your PC.

My PC’s overall rating in Windows 8.

The overall score is just one way to check your PCs performance and many people download other benchmark programs to gauge their computer’s performance, usually to get more details on a particular area of performance like hard drive or video. This may not be needed though as the Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) has much more information than just the one score. To find out more detailed information on your computer’s performance you can open the folder %SystemRoot%\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore and look at the data in the .xml files. There are CPU, Disk, Memory and Video assessments, each with more details.

You can see here that my disk score is 7.75, but you can also see the more detailed Sequential Read and Random Read MB per second results.

I will leave opening and reading the rest of the files to you. It beats downloading a benchmark tool to get a good read of your system’s performance.

Bonus:

If you want to re-run an assessment or if your WinSAT score does not show in the System Control Panel you can run an assessment from the command line.

Winsat formal -verbose

For more options see the Winsat help for your operating system.

Winsat /?

Edit: Changed WinSAT score fro Windows 8 to 9.9 maximum. Thanks to Andre.Ziegler for keeping me on my toes.

This tip is will show how you can verify that Windows Network Load Balancing is working after configuring 2 or more servers to load balance. I will show this example in Windows 2008 R2, but any version of Windows NLB will be similar.

I will use 2 servers, 1NLB2K8 and 2NLB2K8 as the hosts for my NLB cluster and I will be load balancing a very critical application, Telnet Server. My cluster hostname is NLB2K8.

I will not go into the detailed configuration, so if you are setting up your NLB cluster please check the following link for the details; http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770689(v=ws.10).aspx.

Technet also has a guide for verifying NLB operation. The guidance is to disconnect 1 host at a time and test your application (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770582(v=ws.10).aspx). Bummer, I would like to verify my NLB without disconnecting anything, here’s how.

After installing the Telnet Server feature on both of my servers through Server Manager I tested my connection to each server.

Success, the error in the connection is because my 2 NLB servers are not in my domain, so I had to enter my domain credentials.

Now the NLB feature is installed and configured and a host(A) record created in DNS for the cluster name and IP address.

I have enabled all the ports and protocols to load balance, I could have also just used port 23 for this example.

Now to test operation without disconnecting; I will open a Telnet connection to the cluster hostname and verify which server took the connection.

Success! I am connected but to which server?

To find out run netstat.exe –a on each host.

This is the output from 2NLB2K8.

Now since I have single affinity selected for my cluster every connection from the same IP address will go to 2NLB2K8.

To test if another connection is serviced by the second host I tried to connect from another computer.

You can see the Foreign Address is different as I connected from another client with a different IP address.

There may be times that the other hosts in the cluster are not used because of low load on the first host. In that case you can set the cluster host port rule Load weight property to 100 for that host you want to test and 0 for the host you do not want to test. Then you can reverse the settings and test the other host.

Now I can safely say I have a working load balanced Telnet, wow now what should I do with it?