It is quite some time since Microsoft introduced the Windows Experience Index in its operating system. This handy benchmarking score gave a quick and easy way to check the performance of your computer not to see if it would be up to certain tasks, but also to see just what difference various hardware upgrades make.

While previously easily accessible, Microsoft later decided that the score was not of particular interest to most users and therefore made it harder to find. There are still a few ways to view this score in Windows 10, but they are far from user-friendly. This is something that the open source tool Xiret aims to rectify.

This free program makes it very simple to assess the performance of your system, and see benchmark scores for different areas. Although this is not necessarily something that will appeal to everyone, there are plenty of people who seriously miss the easy way it used to me possible to view their Windows Experience Index score. For such people Xiret is a tool of empowerment.

The tool gives you a detailed breakdown and analysis of all of the hardware you have installed, and if you are running the analysis across several systems and want to compare results, there is a handy export option for this very purpose. You may not learn as much from the score and information gathered as you would do from a dedicated benchmarking application, but it's useful data nonetheless.

While it is fair to say that Xiret does not give you access to any more information that you would otherwise be able to get via various means in Windows, it certainly makes things a whole lot easier. In addition to the ease of use, all of the data is present in a highly accessible form which is much more useful than anything else available in the operating system itself these days.