Software: Soluto

Soluto is dubbed the PC Genome Project.  It's totally free and works great on my Windows 7 laptop and is supposed to also work with XP.  Its main function is to "heal" computer crashes.  If you aren't paranoid about privacy, Soluto's collects information about what programs and services are running on your computer so that when you computer crashes, it can check the state of your computer against its database to see if other users had crashes in similar situations.  This way it can help you narrow down what the problem is.

I haven't had any real crashes that I couldn't figure out yet since I installed Soluto, so I can't vouch for its effectiveness in that area.  I've tried the "Lighten Web Browser", but since I use Google Chrome with very little add-ons, it couldn't find a way to speed up my browsing experience.


However, I've used it to cut my boot time down to a quarter of what it used to be.  It knows which startup programs and services can and can't be tampered with.  I've delayed low-priority programs until after startup is finished, like SugarSync (my online backup program which will appear in a future post), webcam software, etc.  I've also disabled unnecessary ones.  It even shows you how much each adds to your boot time.  My boot time once Windows loads is now just over 2 minutes.  I think it used to take about 8 minutes before my computer was fully ready for me to start using it.


I highly recommend it to anyone getting sick of how long it takes to boot their computer.  If anyone was having frequent crashes, I'd recommend it too, although I couldn't say I witnessed success first hand; but it seems a LOT of thought went into its creation, so I wouldn't doubt that it would at least help.