Games, the best diagnostic tools ever made.

For the record…yes… yes it will.. as mentioned, I’d never heard of WinSAT actually… until just a few minutes ago, I was playing Mass Effect 2 (full screen, 1920×1200), and noticed it was getting kind of jumpy. (it was actually smooth through MOST of it, but there was one spot in the 5-6 minutes that it ran that I guess thrashed hardware a bit).

tabbing out, I see WinSAT was running, using 20% at first (and topping up at around 90% a bit into it)… googled, found this.. explained it well enough, but yes.. really annoying. I hate that there isn’t a simple toggle in Vista or Win7 that allows you to halt any non-necessary tasks (that is RESPECTED by all applications)… ESPECIALLY apps hiding in the base win7 install itself!

Anyways, open up Task Scheduler and disable the task. There’s no point in leaving it on, and besides, whatever options may be set to keep it from getting in your way, it still does so.

Andy: Well spotted. I didn't even think to check for a scheduled task. Must've been coincidence that I upgraded my graphics drivers shortly before I noticed it kick in.

I wonder if it does a full run every Sunday, 1am, or if it only does that if it notices the hardware has changed? I'm guessing the latter.

Mine is also set to only start if the computer is idle, though the idle limit is set to only 10 minutes which seems very low. I swear that I've had it kick in exactly at 1am while I've been actively typing into a window but I guess I could've been watching a 10 minute video and have a faulty memory.

I'll up the idle limit and see if that improves things… …Actually, what's the point of it? I'll just disable the task. I can update the numbers manually when/if I care about them.

Thanks again for noticing that Andy! I tend to forget the schedule tasks are there!

Leo

Note: I had to replace angle brackets with curly brackets to get the help doc into blogger comment acceptance.

Vista has it's own grammer issue: "include include"

Windows System Assessment Tool

Other command line paramters include include:
'-v' enable verbose output
'-xml {filename}' save the XML output to 'filename'

Please see the online Command Reference for more information on the command line parameters used with the other assessments.

It is found under Task Scheduler Library\Windows\Maintenance

Also, it is set-up to wait for the computer to be idle for 10 min and give up waiting after an hour.

It is also properly configured to not run if the computer is on battery.

Leo: I've never had that happen to me before, but I can imagine it would indeed be a freak-out if you didn't know what the heck was going on. Is that in Windows Vista where you've had that issue or have you experienced it in Windows 7 as well? And you're absolutely right about the scores serving no real purpose, thus not meriting automatic updating like that.

-Stephen

It does that even if you are actively using the machine. So you're working away and suddenly Aero turns off, you think your display driver has just crashed, and then all your fans turn on due to high CPU/GPU usage and you wonder WTF your computer is doing. You open Task Manager and see its WinSAT.exe (which I had never heard of before), then search Google to find out WTF…

…after a minute or so the machine goes back to normal and Aero is enabled again.

Seems really stupid that the user isn't told that this is going on, or that it's done at all, really, considering those score numbers serve no real purpose and don't desperately need to be updated automatically.

I wonder if it'll happen even if you're in a full-screen game at the time? That would drive me crazy.