@jaden:You say:
Soluto told me that Soluto added 7 seconds to the boot time, plus it was using around 40MB of RAM.
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.
- 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.
Where you say:
I could see it being quite useful for folks who don't know much about what's starting automatically.
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.
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.
