By David W. Methvin
Senior Technical Editor

Do any of these sound familiar? You've just unboxed that sleek new Pentium system and started it up. But something must be wrong; it doesn't seem much faster than your old 486! Where is the problem? Your old system just seems to be getting worse with each passing day. Maybe it's your imagination, but it sure didn't seem to take this long to start your word processor six months ago. Whenever you install a new piece of software, you notice your system seems to have gotten slower. Why would that happen? If you're looking for answers to these problems, you might want to try Wintune, the freeware from WINDOWS Magazine that lets you test and tune your PC for maximum performance.

Tuning In

There are already lots of benchmarks that will give you one or more numbers that evaluate your system's performance. Some are low-level tests that try to stress a particular area of the system and find its limits. Others try to simulate real applications to give you an idea of real-life performance. Others don't simulate applications; they use the actual programs and run them through an automated macro facility.

So why did we invent the Wintune wheel if there were already plenty of tires around? Because we thought those wheels had a few flat spots. For example, most benchmark programs just give you a number or two. After you look at the numbers, you're left with questions like:

• Are these results normal for my configuration?
• The benchmark shows my system is slow. Why?
• What part of my system (CPU, disk, video) is causing the problem?
• Can I speed up this system with some simple software changes?
• If I upgrade some hardware, where will I get the most bang for the buck?

Wintune helps you answer these kinds of questions by flagging questionable results, looking for common system configuration problems, and keeping a database of results you can use to compare your system to others. This can help you whether you want to tune your current system, buy an upgraded component or purchase a whole new system.

We had a few other goals in mind with Wintune that make it quick, portable and easy to use. For example, Wintune fits on a single floppy disk, so you can take it with you and easily install it on other systems. It's small enough to download through the Internet or an online service. We offer Wintune on our Windows CD-ROM Magazine, but it doesn't require a CD-ROM to install or operate.

Wintune is self-contained. It doesn't need anything beyond the standard Windows installation to operate. No applications are required, although Wintune optionally supports Word and Excel macro tests if you already have those two programs installed.

WINDOWS Magazine is making Wintune results available for all the systems that we test-on our Web site, CompuServe and America Online. That means you can download results, add them to your Wintune database, and compare them to the results you're getting on your own system.

Most of the time, you'll want to run all of Wintune's tests, so we've made that easy. In Wintune 95, you click on the Analyze Now button. For Wintune 2.0, click on the Start button. Wintune will go through all of the tests for each subsystem of the PC. You'll see a progress bar that tells you that the tests are running their course.

During the video subsystem test, Wintune will display a window on your screen and draw or scroll a variety of text and images in that window. These tests will sometimes cause an error if the video driver has software bugs. If Wintune displays an error message during the video tests, the most likely cause is a bad video driver. You can check this by changing to another video driver (for example, a different resolution or color depth), or use the standard VGA (640x480 pixel, 16 colors) driver. If the problem goes away, you should contact the vendor to see if it has an updated driver.

Once you've become familiar with Wintune, you may also want to try our Word and Excel application macros. These will give you an idea of real-world application speed as another check of your system's performance. In Wintune 95, you can even run these macros as part of the testing that is done when you click on the Analyze Now button, or you can write your own macros. The Wintune 95 online help has more details on this feature; go to the Details tab, right-click on the Apps item and select Tell Me More.

Once the tests are complete, Wintune analyzes the results and looks for system settings that are significantly out of whack. If it finds any problems, Wintune will generate tips on how to tune or fix the problem. Tips are sorted in order of their importance.

What if you don't get any tips? That's not bad at all in most cases. It means that your system doesn't have any serious problems. However, you may still be able to get better performance by doing a bit of tuning and tweaking. The best thing to do is compare your system to similar systems in Wintune's database and see if yours is up to snuff.

Both Wintune 95 and Wintune 2.0 perform tests on and analyze four major performance subsystems of your computer.

For each subsystem, you get one or two top-line performance measurements, detailed performance results and tuning tips when appropriate. Each analyzer also has an online Help file that provides full details on all the topics.

• CPU: Wintune uses the industry-standard Dhrystone benchmark to test integer CPU performance, and the Whetstone benchmark to measure floating-point performance.

Wintune 2.0 uses a 16-bit version of each of these benchmarks, and Wintune 95 uses a 32-bit version. The 32-bit version of the benchmarks, not surprisingly, runs significantly faster. On a multiple-CPU workstation running under Windows NT, Wintune 95 will test all the CPUs concurrently and show a total performance measure for all processors.

• Memory: Three types of tests are performed on your PC's memory. First is a read-only test using blocks of memory, which is a good diagnostic for memory caches. Next, Wintune does a write-only test with a variety of block sizes.

Finally, a memory copy test is performed; this operation is typical of many buffer-copying operations that run within applications and operating systems.

• Video: Wintune creates a top-level video speed measure by averaging the time it takes to create a window, scroll text, draw lines and geometric objects, and then remove the window. Results of these tests can vary significantly not just from the video board being used, but also from the software drivers and even the speed of your system's CPU.
• Disk: Two top-level measures--cached and uncached performance--are made for each hard disk in the system. These measures are averaged from a variety of sequential and random-access read and write operations, plus the time it takes to actually create and delete a test file in the Windows file system.
• Apps: Wintune 95 adds the ability to run applications and store their results in its own database. Wintune 2.0 was able to store only the results of its own internal tests. You can obtain macros for Word and Excel from the same WinMag locations where Wintune 95 is available. You can also create your own benchmarks in any application that supports hands-free execution, typically via a macro language like Visual Basic for Applications. With the results stored in Wintune's database, you can compare results from different systems and gauge relative performance.

Wintune 95 has a special file format, called a Wintune exchange (.WTX) file, that makes it easy to exchange results with other users. This file contains plain ASCII text, so it can even be sent in the body of an e-mail message. The person who receives the file can import it into his or her own Wintune 95 database and examine the results.

The most common thing you'll want to do is to export the current set of results to a .WTX file. You can do this by selecting File/Export Current from Wintune 95's menu. If you want to export your database, go to the Database tab, select the results you want to export, then right-click on the last system and click on Export All Selected. You'll create a single .WTX file with the results for all of the systems you selected.

Importing results into your database is simpler still. You can either select File/Import from the menu and choose the names of files there, or just drag the .WTX files and drop them on the Wintune 95 window. The database will be updated to reflect the new entries, and you can now use them in charts and reports.

One note of caution: Since the WTX format is plain ASCII, it's possible for an unscrupulous user or vendor to edit the results to make a system appear better than it really is. If you didn't get the results directly from WINDOWS Magazine or a trusted friend, remember that the numbers could have been changed.

Now that you've gotten the tour of Wintune's capabilities, it's time to park the PC under a shade tree, put on your overalls, pull out the toolkit and get to work. Check out the article Tune It and see how you can get the best performance out of your system.

We began the Wintune project in 1993 with a modest goal of providing a set of performance numbers that we-and our readers-could use to compare systems and peripherals. In addition, we developed a set of macros for Microsoft Word and Excel that could measure performance in real-life applications. The result of that effort, Wintune 1.0, was released in November 1993.

As we began to use Wintune for our testing, and as we analyzed the Wintune results our readers were reporting, we found that a lot of systems weren't performing up to their expected level. Often these problems were caused by incorrect software or hardware configurations, so we decided to have Wintune detect and diagnose these problems where possible. When Wintune 2.0 was released in December 1994, it could diagnose more than 40 performance-related problems in Windows 3.x.

Making a version of Wintune for Windows 95 was quite a challenge. We needed the benchmark to be available as soon as Windows 95 shipped, and it had to be a 32-bit application to be able to call the new Windows 95 APIs. Our 16-bit Visual Basic user interface from Wintune 2.0 couldn't be ported because Microsoft's VB 4.0 wasn't available. We instead had to write a user interface from scratch in C++. Then we had to collect performance and tuning tips for an operating system that wasn't even finished yet. A dedicated set of Wintune beta testers helped us track down bugs and work out the tuning tips.