Disappointing Experience Index

My masochistic instincts recently forced me to go and check for driver updates for “melty” - my slightly hot but lovable ASUS VX1 laptop. Specifically I wanted new graphics drivers that might increase my Windows Experience Index rating from 3.5. Most other components were pushing 5, while my “business graphics” and 3D graphics scores were at 3.7 and 3.5 respectively (giving me an overall score of 3.5). My laptop works fine. I’m not a gamer, and even the more involved WPF stuff I’ve done hasn’t pushed it but I wanted a higher score. Melty has a Geforce Go 7400 from NVidia - but NVidia don’t release driver updates directly for notebook graphics cards, so I got my updates from the very intermittent ASUS download site, that makes my $10/month webhost4life hosting look like 5 nines enterprise. After installing the updated drivers (released early March this year, for Vista naturally) I re-ran the “Performance Analysis and Tools” app from the control panel to update my score. My “business graphics” score went DOWN by 0.1, and my 3D graphics score was un-changed. Disappointing to say the least, given that the previous driver was written by MS and this one was from NVidia, which I had assumed would be able to write a decent driver given that they MADE THE CHIP. This underwhelming driver upgrade triggered a slew of other driver and bios upgrades by me to see what could be done to improve my perf but to no avail. An hour later I had rolled everything back. From here it looks like the NVidia Go 7600 and ATI X1400 mobility chipsets are what is required for stellar 4.5+ graphics scores. The SLI-capable GeForce GO 7900 GTX can get a 5.9. Wow. 

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