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Measuring PC boot-up time by component - and tweaking it with Soluto
IainB:
@jaden:
You say:
Soluto told me that Soluto added 7 seconds to the boot time, plus it was using around 40MB of RAM.
--- End quote ---
Yes. On my laptop (running XP Pro SP3 and with all MS updates):
* Soluto tells me that it takes 11.9 sec. of boot-up time, and has a "disk load" of 28MB.
* Process Explorer tells me Soluto has a "virtual size" of 198,732K.
Soluto recommends of itself:
Keep it in boot, as it improves the operation of your PC by giving you control over the applications launching in your boot.
--- End quote ---
- which I think is a reasonable recommendation.
By the way, over in the Soluto discussion forum, they say:
You should keep Soluto since it protects your OS startup.
Somehow unwanted software finds its way to your machine and loads automatically. This is why we run every boot.
Don't worry about resources Soluto takes on runtime. It moves into stand by mode if you do not touch the software.
--- End quote ---
Where you say:
I could see it being quite useful for folks who don't know much about what's starting automatically.
--- End quote ---
No. The point I was trying to make above was that:
Soluto at least told me something that I did not know before - i.e., all the precise boot-up times statistics by components.
--- End quote ---
That is, I would seem to be better informed now about the performance of my running processes when using Soluto, than when not using Soluto. I was already reasonably well-informed about automatic starts and running processes by virtue of using tools such as, for example, Autoruns, Process Explorer, and the Windows Services control panel, but these tools did not give me any real idea of process startup performance times.
Soluto thus offered new data and presented it in a novel and very intuitive manner, to enable me to make decisions about:
* "Pause" - i.e. remove from boot/startup).
* "Delay" - i.e., start up after boot has completed).
* "In Boot" - i.e., keep in boot/startup.The net effect is that, as well as giving me new performance data (i.e., that I did not previously have) about process boot/startup performance and resource utilisation, Soluto probably saves me "tweaking time" that would otherwise be spent playing around with the other aforementioned tools whilst investigating running processes. Another thing that I find particularly useful is that once you have selected one of "Pause" or "Delay" or "In Boot" buttons for any given process, that process is then moved to the appropriate category in the dynamically interactive chart, where you can subsequently go and view it and select one of the other category buttons if you change your mind.
Whilst you are fiddling around like this, Soluto is keeping score of the last aggregate/total boot-up time (and its components) and what effect you will have on boot-up time with the changes you are making.
I would call this sort of control a dynamic "dashboard" control, and it is one of the most elegant and novel designs of a dashboard that I have come across. It is ergonomically quite well-designed - though I could ask for some improvements - and it is relatively idiot-proof. I would think it would be hard to beat for ease and simplicity of use, yet it's not a dumbed-down tool. That is, it still gives the user the flexibility and power to monitor, control and make decisions about optimising the performance of the full range of relatively complex boot/startup process operations.
Soluto is still in ß, but, because of the above points, I think it would bear watching to see how it develops.
wr975:
My PC (Win7x64 3 GB) needs 13 seconds to wake up from hibernate, so there's really no need to improve the boot-time, but after reading so much praise, I thought I gave it a try. And I'm not impressed. >:(
Solution seems to me like a super dumbed-down "WinPatrol" with amazing GUI. It looks great, even the installer looks amazing, but there's nothing you can actually configure.
Users can right-click the tray icon and select "My PC just frustrated me". Soluto told me "Ongoing frustration research must be enabled in order to report frustrations". Must be the weirdest message box I've seen in a long time.
Once I enabled this function and clicked again "My PC just frustrated me" I got an animated postcard, telling me "Frustration Data will be sent to the PCGenome, thanks."
Seriously, wtf? This is the Teletubbies version of Winpatrol. :P
Don't worry about resources Soluto takes on runtime. It moves into stand by mode if you do not touch the software.
--- End quote ---
That's normal behavior for all programs, but still the PC is forced to load three processes (Soluto 5M, SolutoServices 35M, SolutoConsole 26M.) :tellme:
WinPatrol doesn't tell me how long an application needs to start (useless information anyway), but it can delay startup-entries and protects from new installed services and startup entries as well.
Anyway, Soluto isn't for the computer geek. It's for the average user, who likes the design, being able to report frustrations (best feature ever :P) and enjoy the "Just click, I'll do everything for you" approach. Kinda like Apple products.
daddydave:
I installed this and accepted all their recommendations except delaying Avast and WinPatrol and seeing if it breaks anything.
I don't know how useful is, but is a pretty user interface.
It seemed a little too mouse sensitive to me, had to hover over task several times in some cases to click on it.
daddydave:
On my first re-boot, the savings on boot-up were a little over 2 minutes off my 6-minute boot-up time. After some more tweaking after that, and then a huge Windows Update today, the time has gone back up to 6:03 minutes, so there's still more tweaking required, methinks.
-IainB (June 09, 2010, 10:29 AM)
--- End quote ---
That Windows update was something, wasn't it? Did you see a message about 30,000 registry changes when it came back up? This happened immediately after I tweaked with Soluto, so it made me think it caused it. It did increase boot time and there was nothing else I could tweak, everything was in the block of mandatory tasks.
jojo99:
Useless program with a pretty UI.
Among other dumb recommendations, it suggested I remove my Comodo firewall from boot-up as it took like 12 seconds to start!
There were a number of things I didn't like about this program including:
That this program MUST be connected to the net to run as it reports its findings (supposedly anonymized) to its dB.
AND if you uninstall it and have removed any applications from the start-up process, it will restore those removed programs during uninstall.
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