If the Soluto name sounds familiar to you, it is because this company won first place in the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 competition for start-up of the year. If you haven't heard of them, then rest assured that their victory was well earned. Their product of the same name, claims to "bring an end to PC user frustration with transparency, killer technology, and your help". After spending a little time with this product, I must say that I am quite impressed.
If you are a Windows user, Soluto is a lightweight client that runs in the background, though fairly unobtrusively. Upon installation and a reboot, you will notice a timer at the bottom left hand corner of your desktop. This timer counts up until every start-up process has launched and your desktop has fully loaded. A window then opens up, and gives you a graphical representation of each process that is configured to start at boot-up. Many of these processes are blatantly unnecessary, and Soluto will tell you which ones are safe to either disable or delay. You don't have to worry about removing something important by accident, as the application makes it clear which ones should be left as is.
Soluto calls upon its knowledge of these processes from what they refer to as the PC Genome Server. To contribute to the online knowledge base, wait until your PC exhibits some quirky behavior, then initiate Soluto from the task bar. Anonymous technical details are then sent to Soluto's servers for analysis.
I ran Soluto on a notebook running Windows 7. My initial boot clocked in at about 1 minute 55 seconds. After using Soluto to reconfigure the boot-up processes, the following boot clocked in at 50 seconds. That's no typo, I was able to shave my desktop launch by more than half. Bear in mind that I am an IT person and I know how to keep a clean OS. I can't wait to run this utility on a really junked up PC to see what a difference it can make.
By all means, pay no mind to my over simplified explanation. See the embedded video, also available on the Soluto website, for more details. The application can be downloaded here. Bear in mind, it is currently in beta.
