Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!warwick!asrap
From: asrap@warwick.ac.uk (Sean Legassick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Norton Si
Message-ID: <224@orchid.warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 18 Aug 89 16:17:38 GMT
References: <478@v7fs1.UUCP>
Reply-To: asrap@warwick.ac.uk (Sean Legassick)
Organization: Computing Services, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 22

In article <478@v7fs1.UUCP> sv@v7fs1.UUCP (Steve Verity) writes:
>	Anyone out there know just what the heck Norton's SI
>measures?  The utility tells us that it is measuring performance
>relitive to the PC.  Still, what does *that* mean?
>
Norton SI is supposed to give you the peformance of your machine
relative to a plain vanilla IBM PC - don't see many of them now! -
as a figure, i.e. if SI returns a value of 2.0, then your machine
should be twice as fast as an IBM PC.

It does this by running benchmarks, comparing the time taken to peform
certain mundane activities with the time it takes a PC. In this age
of VGA displays and frequent hard-disk accesses, however, this
figure bears little relation to actual real-time usage, and so is
of little use.

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SSSSSSS K  K L       Sean K Legassick
S       K K  L       Coventry
SSSSSSS KK   L       England
      S K K  L                 "I'm not expendible, I'm not stupid
SSSSSSS K  K LLLLLLL             and I'm not going!"     Avon (Blakes 7)