Benchmarking tips

Following these guidelines will make your life running benchmarks (even benchmarks other than WebMark 2004) 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.
• 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 WebMark 2004 with the same user ID.
• Recommended Memory: A minimum of 128MB 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 WebMark 2004: manually restart the system.
• Make sure you have at least 2 Gigabytes of free disk space before you install and run WebMark 2004.
• If you plan to run WebMark 2004 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 WebMark 2004 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, WebMark 2004 will be able to properly recover your system, even after power failures and hardware failures.
• If WebMark 2004 disappears from your Start menu, do not re-install it until you try shutting down and rebooting your system. In most cases this will solve the problem.