System: Dell Inspiron 531, Athlon 64 Dual Core, Windows 7 Home Premium
Q: When I try to run the Windows 7 Experience Index I get the following message: ‘The Windows Experience Index for your system could not be completed. Could not measure storage performance. Error: Failed to properly assess the disk. The parameter is incorrect.’ Can you please explain what’s going wrong?
A: This error usually means that the Experience Index is unable to access the disk for some reason. This could be because it’s being blocked by another application. The most likely culprit for this is a security program so try disabling your antivirus software and running the index again. Background defrag programs like Diskeeper can have a similar effect.
If it still doesn’t work then you need to check the disk for errors. Click Start/ All Programs/ Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator. At the prompt type chkdsk /f /r and press Enter. This checks the disk for errors, bad sectors and corruption, the /f flag attempts to automatically fix file system errors and the /r flag will attempt to repair bad sectors. The process may take a while to complete. Once you’ve done that run the sfc /scannow command in the same way to check for and replace damaged system files. You can also try running a storage assessment from the command line as follows: winsat disk –seq –read –n 0 this is the technology underlying the Experience Index so if it works there’s no reason why it shouldn’t also run from the menu.
The Windows experience Index gives you an indication of your system’s performance
Originally featured in PCU 138
