Thinkpads Forum

Reading in PC World, I stumbled upon a most useful utility, that analyzes what's happening at boot time in Windows.
It gives you options to delay or remove these from starting, with indication of how much time you can possibly save.
The name for this free program? Soluto
http://find.pcworld.com/70486

I shaved almost 70 seconds of my boot time (5 year old installation of XP/SP3). Well worth it, but YMMV.

Great find, RBS...thanks for sharing!

This tool reminds me a little of the old BootVis. jv16 PowerTools also offers a Startup Manager module, but it lacks a timing feature.

Nice app

Displays information in a much clearer and more intuitive way compared to the Bootvis, which I could never figure out.

However, the results are somewhat inconsistent. From the app I learned that the SFTP server I use on all my computers takes about 10-15 seconds during startup, which is a lot for a single app.

Seems like an easy solution - change to a different, more lightweight one. Which I did, now it takes less than 1 second to load. However - overall system boot time seems to have gone up by almost 20 seconds. WTF? Happened on two separate Thinkpads.

And then, sometimes there is an almost 30 second discrepancy in boot time between consecutive restarts, with the same number of apps running...

Well, my hopes for this program have been dashed, at least for the moment.

It continually loads as "learning first boot" whenever I reboot my WinXP SP3, 32-bit system. It also fails to connect to the "PC Genome" online database, even after I disable my Comodo firewall and Kaspersky AV.

After all, it is a beta, but apparently some folks are having success with it. The company that developed it has accumulated nearly $8MM in VC and angel financing, so I expect it will eventually get the bugs worked out.

EDIT (9/25/10): I finally uninstalled this from my T43 (WinXP SP3, 32-bit) as Soluto isn't quite ready for prime time, even in its beta iteration.

To an extent, the functionality of this application resembles that of The Ultimate Troubleshooter.

I was curious enough to try Soluto on my T43p (Win 7 home premium) after reading several positive articles. I usually don't mess with anything that says "Beta" on it, and after my experience, I will continue to do so. After downloading, installing and re-booting, Soluto hung on "Loading". Gave it half an hour to see if could get its act together. Disabled firewall and virus scanner, no joy. Re-booted, did the same thing, only took twice as long to reboot. Gave up and went to remove program. Windows uninstaller hung, and wouldn't remove program. Re-booted - Soluto is back and hung on "Loading" once again. This time I went at it with Revo Uninstaller. That hung also at the Windows uninstall routine, but allowed me to continue and remove all references to Soluto in the registry and file paths. Final re-boot came up clean.

Soluto has a good idea, and it would be a useful tool, but they have a lot of work ahead of them on stability issues IMHO.

I haven't tried it on any laptop, but installed it only on my PC, because that was taking forever to boot.
Nearly 4 minutes!
After applying Soluto, I am now down to 2.45 minutes, a major improvement!

I desperately need to do something with my PC.
I have a second instance of XP-Pro ready and waiting, but haven't installed all the other programs on it yet, so I'm still chugging along in this 5 year old installation.
I'll build a new PC and get W7 on it, when W7-SP1 comes out.
My current one is an old (2004) Abit AV8 3rd-Eye mobo with AGP8x Matrox Parhelia P650, an AMD64 3200 CPU and 2GB RAM.
Time to get rid of this oldie and replace it with a nice new Intel-based setup. No more AMD...

Great finding RBS! Thanks!

I'll try it asap in my wife's desktop. I have an old XP SP3 installation there and it also takes ages to boot. Funny thing is that it takes long with her user (with limited authorization rights), if I use my administrator user it's faster, allthough the programs installed with each user are not so different.

I'm using Ccleaner to keep an eye on the boot sequence, I have really a minimum of programs like antivir, graphic drivers, firewall, etc. But it still takes ages...

RealBlackStuff wrote:I'll build a new PC and get W7 on it, when W7-SP1 comes out

I'm using Win7 in my desktop and some of my TPs, it boots really fast and it's also stable. MS put it right this time

Cheers!

invest in a SSD, I went from 70 seconds to completely log into windows from the login screen, to about 8-10 seconds. There are 122 processes that load up on my Windows 7 64bit install.

A quad-core CPU, an SSD and a mobo with USB3.0 and SATA3 are in my near future.
Black Friday, here I come...