A Quick Look at Soluto
It has been a long time since I last looked at software to improve boot speeds (“Windows Startup Tuning” from December ‘08). A new option recently crossed my radar though and it has some interesting wrinkles.
For starters, Soluto is probably the prettiest little startup manager you’ve ever used for Windows. Definitely a non-traditional GUI with lots of whiz-bang effects. Be sure to explore when you first start it up. Notice what happens when you hover over various objects to find all the options, buttons and knobs.
Install it, reboot and watch it analyze and time the boot process. It will categorize all the startup stuff as “No- brainer – remove from boot”, “potentially removable”, “Required” and then finally “removed.” The software collects and aggregates everyone’s decisions and can show you what others have chosen. Hopefully they choose wisely…
The No-brainer items you can opt to delay them to start after the boot or just pause them. If you pause them you have to remember to start them manually when you need them (a lot of the silly little tray apps can quite safely be paused). If you hover over an item you get more information, including stats on what other folks have done with it (aka the “wisdom of the crowds”):
From there you can choose Pause, Delay or click “Advanced for even more info.
Pretty cool, eh? Just work through all the startup items and decided what you can pause and delay. Reboot and see how it works out. There’s a History option at the bottom of the Soluto screen that will show you a historical graph of your boot times.
I’d suggest not getting too aggressive on the first try. I ended up with a dramatically faster boot but some odd side-effects due to my over-aggressive ways. Fortunately, the UI displays what you’ve paused/disabled so you can re-enable them all back to boot and then try again (The FAQ says the next version will have a one-button reset which will be nice!).
Soluto’s goal is to bring an end to the frustrations PC users encounter, with transparency, killer technology, and the wisdom of the crowd. Soluto’s software combines low-level driver technology with collective wisdom, to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience. All this data is gathered in Soluto’s PC Genome, a knowledgebase of frustrations and solutions built automatically through the usage of Soluto software, for the benefit of all PC users.
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