BAPCo SMark 2004 SE: About: Benchmarking tips and tricks

Benchmarking tips and tricks
Following these guidelines will make your life running benchmarks (even benchmarks other than SYSmark 2004 SE) much easier.

In Start -> Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance, make sure the Scheme is set to Windows Standard (the default scheme).
Non-US operating systems: Please read Non-US operating systems.
Disable the Active desktop feature.
Disconnect your system from the network and reboot before running SYSmark 2004 SE.
A minimum video resolution of 1024x768 with 65536 colors is required.
Make sure you are using the latest drivers for your system components (e.g. video cards).
Set your operating system Virtual Memory settings to use twice the amount of physical memory on the system. For example, if you have 256 MB RAM on your system, set your Virtual Memory page file size to 512 MB.
Disable login passwords.
Make sure you are a user with administrative privileges.
Make sure you run and install SYSmark 2004 SE with the same user ID.
Recommended Memory: A minimum of 256 MB of RAM is required for the benchmark to run.
Convergence of results: For an official run, with multiple iterations, to converge it is necessary that all ratings for each group be within 5% of that group's average rating. If this is not the case then an official disclosure will not be generated.
If your system becomes unresponsive for a long time while running SYSmark 2004 SE: Manually restart the system. You may get a message asking you if you would like to restore the environment. Choosing Yes will bring back your system to its original state.
Make sure you have at least 7 Gigabytes of free disk space before you install and run SYSmark 2004 SE.
If you plan to run SYSmark 2004 SE on a system containing important applications or data, it is a good idea to perform a system backup, including a registry backup, before running the benchmark. While every effort has been made to ensure that SYSmark 2004 SE will run smoothly on your system, in rare cases, power failures or hardware failures during benchmark runs may modify the registry or system folder. However in most cases, SYSmark 2004 SE will be able to properly recover your system, even after power failures and hardware failures.
If you have problems related to printers while running SYSmark 2004 SE, there should be 3 printers installed: __BAPCo_Printer_1, Acrobat Distiller and Acrobat Printer. If any other printer is present, try uninstalling them from Start -> Printers and Faxes.