Your choice of components can introduce bottlenecks in your system. Tracking these down is never easy, but SiSoftware's Sandra Professional 2007 aims to help you.
It consists of a series of benchmarks that test your PC's performance and alert you to major problems. The easiest way to use Sandra is to run the system-wide Performance Index tool. This plots five points of performance in a chart. If you see a weak point, you've found your bottleneck. The software includes a massive internal database of components, so you can see the theoretical improvement that upgrading would make before you buy.
The problem with Sandra is that it tests individual components with artificial benchmarks rather than real applications, so it's only roughly indicative of how your PC will perform in everyday use. For this reason it's probably worth running some real applications as well. You can download our games test files from www.computershopper.co.uk/howwetest.
Sandra isn't just about performance, though, as its tests also probe your PC for problems. You can run in-depth tests for each system component to get more information. For each finding Sandra presents a detailed solution. How useful you find these will depend on your level of computer knowledge, as some fault fixing requires you to change BIOS settings. There's also the problem that some of the fault-finding tests throw up errors because of missing legacy components that you won't have on a modern PC.
Sandra is an excellent tool for tracking down bottlenecks and faults, but it's often complex to follow and provides far too much information. Unless you're a professional, we'd recommend downloading the free Lite version instead, which includes the most useful tests.
System Specifications
Requires Windows 2000 or XP
Author: Clive Webster
Computer Shopper Online