Q: Do you have any guidelines or documentation available on how to best take advantage of PCMark Vantage in a professional testing environment? A: The PCMark Vantage Reviewer's Guide and White Paper provide detailed information on how to best take advantage of PCMark Vantage's test suites. As a general rule, we recommend that IT professionals and reviewers run the full set of test suites (PCMark Suite as well as all the individual suites) to be able to get a broad picture of a PC's performance. Both documents can be downloaded from PCMark Vantage's product page.

Q: Why my Memories/TV and Movies Score is so low even though I can process images/watch HD video very well with my computer using 3rd party applications? A: PCMark Vantage is designed to measure your Microsoft(r) Windows Vista performance in those and other common usages, not how well some 3rd party applications perform. PCMark Vantage uses applications and features that ship with Windows Vista, those applications and features depend on which version of Windows Vista you have bought. For example, Microsoft(r) Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate have features that have a great effect on Memories and TV and Movies Score.

Q: I'm unable to run the TV and Movies suite in PCMark Vantage and receive an error message: The following set cannot be run due to not having Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Decoder installed: Video Playback MPEG-2 HDTV, Video playback - MPEG Blu-ray The following set cannot be run due to not having Microsoft MPEG-1/DD Audio Decoder installed: Video Playback MPEG-2 HDTV, Video playback - MPEG Blu-ray A: To run the TV and Movies Suite you need to have either Windows Vista Ultimate, Home Premium or Enterprise installed. The suite requires the Windows Media Center and its Microsoft's MPEG-2 decoder to be available on the system. If you have Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows Vista Business installed on your system, you unfortunately won't be able to run the TV and Movies suite before upgrading to Windows Vista Home Premium, Ultimate or Entreprise.

Q: Previous PCMark versions have been free and now I have to pay to run PCMark Vantage more than once! Why have you changed your pricing? A: Due to the increased amount of work necessary to create a benchmark for Windows Vista OS which has required new software engines, tooling and artwork as well as an increased level of web services and analysis tools, offered to the benchmarking consumers, we have had to change our pricing strategy for PCMark(R) Vantage. A no cost option is still available in the form of a one-time use Trial Version of the Basic edition. The Trial version will deliver a PCMark Vantage score and allow for submission of a result into the Online Results Browser, but, will require upgrading to the Basic Version for benchmarkers who want to use it for an unlimited number of runs. This can be done by simply entering in the correct registration code for the basic version without requiring an additional download.

Q: Why does PCMark Vantage require Windows Vista in order to run? I have a completely good system running Windows XP and I'd like to run the benchmark on it. A: Windows Vista introduces many innovative new technologies which are not available in Windows XP, so any software application which takes advantage of these features will require the new operating system in order to run. We recommend using PCMark05 for benchmarking systems running Windows XP.

Q: The benchmark hangs indefinitely during startup, so I’m totally unable to run it. How can this be corrected? A: On some recent hardware the System Info module of the benchmark may freeze. There are currently two workarounds for this problem: Installing the latest version of 3DMark Vantage on the system will update the problematic components and may help to correct some of the problems. If you encounter this problem, you should first try installing 3DMark Vantage v. 1.0.1 on the system and see whether this will correct the problem. You do not need to register or run 3DMark Vantage for this fix to help. As an alternative measure, you can search and delete all instances of DirecPLL.dll from the system. This method may solve some of the problems as well.