Soluto: A Tool for Speeding Up Boot-Time

God only knows how many programs I install or uninstall every year. Over the ~four years I've owned my Dell Dimension laptop, the registry that controls Windows XP SP3 has probably been tied into knots.

Most of the time, this doesn't cause major problems. Every few months, I experience some really scary lockup that gives me that sinking Oh, shit . . . what have I done to myself now? sensation. But I've always managed (so far, at least) to work my way back out of the hole that I've dug myself into.

But one of the results of all my tinkering is that my machine takes what feels like an inordinate amount of time to boot up. I periodically go through my startup programs to see what can be disabled (despite my best efforts, some of those programs seem to insist on installing as autostart programs), and I've got the machine programmed to periodically defrag its drive.

But the machine still takes way too long to get running.

Last week, I ran across a new program that's helped somewhat. It's called Soluto, and it's billed as anti-frustration software. Officially launched on May 24th at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, the product purports to:

allow PC users to understand their boot and discover which applications are
slowing them down. Soluto Beta not only cuts down your boot, it also
improves your ongoing PC performance for you.

The product looks promising. After I installed the program and rebooted, Soluto Beta loaded during my reboot and, after I was fully up, gave me a list of applications that were loading during bootup. The applications were grouped into three categories:

• applications which could probably be disabled from autostarting
• apps which I might want to consider disabling
• essential apps which I ought not to mess with

Within each category, I was presented with information about each app's purpose and given an opportunity to change its status. By making a few judicious choices, I was able to pare my start time down from 4:05 to 2:50. Still too long, but better.

Soluto Beta keeps track of the changes one makes, and one has the opportunity to go back and undo any change that appears in retrospect to evoke that Oh, shit! feeling.

It's worth trying.

But if you do decide to give Soluto Beta a try, make sure you're downloading it from the official http://www.soluto.com/ site. With all the publicity surrounding the product's winning 1st place in the Disrupt event, reports have surfaced that malware distributors have begun disguising their own nefarious products as Soluto.