Review: Soluto and how it’s awesome

We’re all sick of our computers slowing down on us after a while. Pressing that power button just fills you with dread, and some of you shake out your newspaper and lean back in your chair to read while your computer starts up.

It’s annoying, and it takes a lot of time that could be put to better uses. A lot of you don’t like playing with msconfig, the Windows solution to the problem, as it’s confusing to normal people, and CCleaner’s solution doesn’t improve things either. You never know what’s causing the slowness, and disable things that really aren’t causing any problems.

Well, Soluto is the answer to this dilemma. A rich and intuitive user interface with powerful functionality, Soluto is a great program that will analyze what’s happening during boot up and show you the results, and allow you to delay or pause the programs. Not only that, but it has a large community behind it as well, so you can see what others did with the application involved, and what will happen if you perform an action with it.

After you download and install it, it will ask you to reboot your computer. Don’t fill up with dread here, it will probably be the last time for a while that you have to endure another long boot up. While the computer is booting, Soluto is in there analyzing everything throughout the startup process. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see a corner of your desktop peeled up like this:

This means Soluto is monitoring the process every step of the way. When the corner disappears, Soluto will open, but if it doesn’t, click the Soluto icon in the system tray on the taskbar or open it up from the Start Menu.

You’ll be presented with a screen that looks a lot like this:

Speeding up boot times

Hover or click the “Chop Boot” circle and it will take you to a screen that will help you shorten the boot process. It has three categories; No-Brainer, which are programs that Soluto recommends removing from the boot process or delaying,  Potentially Removable, which is for advanced users, but you can take a look anyway, and Cannot be removed with Soluto, which is a list of programs which can’t be removed with Soluto, yet anyways.

Pick and remove or delay some apps, focusing on the ones that take up the most time. All you have to do is hover over an app in the card-style view, and a menu will appear, listing what users did with it and the recommended option. Any removed apps will go in the shaded area in the bottom of the window.

I was able to shave off half the boot time by using this program, and probably more if I had removed Microsoft Security Essentials, but I do need antivirus. I hope they add the option to delay its start up soon, it would probably make a huge difference for me (about a minute).

Making your browser faster

Not only does it help speed up your computer, but Soluto can speed up your web browser too. Currently it only seems to support Chrome and Internet Explorer, as I have Firefox (nightly build) and Opera installed as well.

It also doesn’t show the time it took to start the browser up and what addons are affecting it, which is something I would love to see as Chrome hasn’t been as fast for me lately.

But it does show what the large community did with each addon, so that helps.

Analyze Crashes

Soluto can also help you with diagnosing program crashes. Unfortunately, my programs have not crashed much, and the last crashes were before Soluto was installed, so I only had two programs on the screen.

Supposedly, it will analyze the crash and provide a community-submitted solution from their database, the PC Genome. I haven’t had an app crash yet since Soluto was installed, so it didn’t have any data to find a solution with.

Conclusion

Soluto is an awesome solution to a common problem. It has a lot of handy features, the biggest one for me is the time measurements. However, I think it’s lacking some useful features, as with analyzing the start up time in the web browser screen and adding support for more browsers.

I think another feature which would be great would be analyzing how much a hard drive defrag would help boot time. That would save me many hours when defragging. Maybe even a registry optimizer as well, but that’s kind of advanced.

So if you want this awesome program, just visit the official site and download it:

Soluto - Anti-Frustration Software