windows 7 customer experience index - why needed, turning off

It is not running that I can see on my Windows 7 Pro 64-bit ThinkPad (fresh install where the preload was Vista). So if it is not running on my machine (which works perfectly well), I cannot imagine that it is needed.

Check and see (if you can) what measurements it uses. I use the Reliability Monitor in Action Center all the time. I check the very few errors I get and try to make improvements. I would not turn off any measurements that affect the Reliability Monitor.

Otherwise, how to turn it off, I do not know, but I suspect it is in the startup sequence somewhere.
.. Thinkpads_User

And this page (also for Vista) should be pretty applicable to Windows 7 as far as explaining what the Windows Experience Index is, how to use it, etc.:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsvista/pages/windows-experience-index-an-in-depth-look.aspx

It runs by schedule, not at startup. I noticed it when the stats page was suddenly populated as of today at 6:36 PM local time. I upgraded the PC to Win 7 yesterday, so this was the first run.

LeeTutor - Thanks. The background article is very informative. Looks like something I don't need unless performance suddenly goes down or I'm contemplating some major new thing to do with the PC. So I am inclined to disable it.

I had found the Group Policy Editor setting before but I didn't use it since the setting is to deny access to the data. Does this mean that the checks still run but they are simply not shown to the user? Or does it mean they are actually not run?

Everyone - Thinkpads_user's remarks sent me back to reviewing the task scheduler with the Autoruns program. Three items seem directly related to this in the Task Scheduler. All are in \Microsoft\Windows\Customer Experience Improvement Program\. They are:

Consolidator - description: Windows SQM Consolidator
KernelCeipTask - description: Kernel CEIP task
UsbCeip - description: USBCEOP Task

The programs are all in c:\windows\system32; they are:
wsqmcons.exe
kernelceip.dll
usbceip.dll

Would you recommend (a) using the Group Policy Editor setting LeeTutor mentioned or (b) disabling the scheduler tasks? Or both or something else?

Thanks,
Pete

Thank you everyone. Senad's input was most directly helpful in pointing me to the Task Scheduler which actually has clear (!) explanations. I also found a few other tasks relating to CEIP and to defrag to disable. LeeTutor's pointers to the experience index description and the group policy editor were also very informative. thinkpads_user's inputs were a bit more general although I may look into Startup Organizer. Thank you again to everyone.