One of Windows Vista's most talked about features, probably because the lack of features, has been the "Microsoft System Performance Rating". It's a shame Microsoft has come under fire for this; although, it is understandable that an OEM wouldn't want to sell a computer to a consumer to find they got a cruddy system. What I do not like about the system is the way Microsoft rates the system according to its weakest component; the simplicity of the scoring leads to inaccurate scores.

When it is a crical component that is scoring the weakest, it does make sense to give it a greater weighting in the final score; but, when your system scores a two because you installed it on a small size, but fast, Raptor hard drive it makes no sense.

What I really want Microsoft to do with this system is to use it instead of "minimum requirements" on the back of game boxes. Instead we could just see something like: "Requires a system with a Vista score higher than 4.5, with a recommended score above 5". Such a system could spell the end for consumers getting computers that do not do what they want; not because of their own incompetence, but because of the complex nature of computer hardware. Even Tech savvy users wouldn't mind a system being placed upon individual components, as it would bring prices of underachieving/over priced components down so they are competitive "bang for your buck" products.

So I am rather happy when I read that:

With the politics of rating systems out of the way, let's consider the "consumer confusion" angle. According to Microsoft, the benchmark is supposed to give users an idea of what their system can do in a simple numeric form, such as "3." The purpose of this is not to breed users running around shouting, "I'm a three!" What Microsoft envisions is a software store packed with titles that carry these same ratings, and happy shoppers buzzing around knowing that they can reliably run anything marked with their score (or less). That is to say, this is an attempt to simply the system requirements dance.

Please Microsoft, tell the OEMs a shabby computer is a shabby computer , but do some refinements to the System Performance Rating feature. With the right changes this could be a turning point for consumers and computers.