Override Winsat statistics

You think your computer may run Vista's Aero features just fine, but the Windows Experience Index you've got is low?


You're in luck! Now go and do this:

• regedit and find HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/DWM/
  in there set these two keys:
  
  
  Composition = 1
  CompositionPolicy = 2
  
  
  (if the keys are not present create them REG_DWORD aka DWORD 32-bit value)
  
• restart "Desktop Window Manager Session Manager". You can do this at least in two modes:
  
  
  1. RUN services.msc
     locate "Desktop Window Manager Session Manager" and click Restart
     
  2. 
     RUN net stop uxsms & net start uxsms
     
  
  

As a side note, Winsat keeps a list of XML file in %systemroot%\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore for each assessment of your computer's performance.

You can find here a more detailed explanation of the score you got.

Also inside the registry under the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ you'll find some more detailed information about your score.

At the time of this writing this doc used to work well. Here's a Google Cache of the document, just in case.