Windows Experience Index is a Windows feature introduced with Windows Vista which is used to benchmark Windows PCs and offers a score. It was removed from Windows 8.1 and cannot be found in newer versions of Windows as well. However, a couple of people, particularly NVIDIA graphics cards users in the past experienced some freezing and even BSODs while running the Windows Experience Index utility.
To fix this issue, we’ll have to disable DXVA, which crashes while trying to use the GPU to accelerate decoding H264 video. A second solution to this is to update the devices BIOS firmware, which varies between devices.
Continue reading the article to see how to prevent the Windows Experience Index from freezing.
Method 1: Disable DXVA
DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) is a Microsoft API for Windows that allows video decoding to be hardware accelerated. If we disable DXVA, we should be able to get WEI to run flawlessly. Here’s how it’s done.
- Download DXVA Check from here and run it. Note that is requires .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Runtime.
- Go the DSF/MFT tab and click the DSF/MFT Viewer
- Under DirectShow and Media Foundation, locate the entries shown in red – these entries are DXVA-accelerated.
- Click Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder, or on any of them, and at the lower-right corner, click on GPU Acceleration and Disable DXVA.
- Try testing WEI again to confirm it’ll complete successfully this time.
Method 2: Update Graphics Drivers
Apparently, a user fix this after updating their graphics driver. You should certainly try doing this too.
- Press Windows + X and select Device Manager or you can press Windows + R to open the command prompt, type devmgmt.msc and click OK.
- Expand the Display adapters category and then right-click on the video card, select Update Driver, and the follow the prompts to apply the update.
- After installing the video driver on your PC, make a reboot and try testing again to confirm it’ll complete successfully this time.
You can also visit your PC’s support website and get the specific drivers from there. You can do this by typing “your PC model + drivers” (eg. Acer E71 drivers) in Google.
Method 3: Updating BIOS
Finally, this may be an issue arising from your graphics hardware and can only be fixed after a BIOS upgrade. You can learn more on how to update your BIOS here
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