Screenshot Tour: Soluto speeds up your Windows boot time with help from the crowd

Techy types like the typical Download Squad reader are just fine with manually tweaking our systems and using utilities that less savvy folks would cringe at. For them, it's not always such an easy task to find an easy-to-use program which actually does what it promises.

One newly launched app which is perfect for neophytes is Soluto. Just launched at TC Disrupt, Soluto calls itself "anti-frustration software," though at this point the only frustration it can tackle is slow Windows boot times.

But that's a task it handles with aplomb, and its interface provides plenty of information to help guide even the most casual user through the process of trimming down a sluggish startup process.

After performing a somewhat lengthy initial scan of the software installed on your system (mine took somewhere between ten and twelve minutes) and first-run boot analysis, Soluto displays startup items in three categories: no-brainers, potentially removable (recommended for more advanced users), and required. Pick a program, view its description, see how much time it adds to your boot process, and decide whether you'd like to pause or delay it to help speed things up.

Soluto will even tell you what other users chose to do with a specific program -- as long as someone else has tinkered with it already.

(more screenshots after the break!)

As with any crowd-powered program, Soluto is going to get better as more people use it. On my test system, it didn't yet know what Limewire was -- despite it being one of the most-used file sharing programs around. If you'd like to help out, clicking the edit button brings up a wiki editor where you can add a description and your recommendations.

I'd also like to see an automatic mode -- a one-click tune-up -- added as more user data is collected.

Soluto does a pretty good job spelling things out in terms that most users will be able to understand. Even though services.exe can't be tweaked, Soluto still lets you know what it is and why it's important.

On the program's history page, you'll see a graph of your boot times. This particular bit of the interface still needs some work, as most of the call-outs didn't contain any information and I'm assuming they should. I was expecting to find information about what apps I'd disabled and how much time was saved. Soluto is still beta, of course, so this will probably be hammered out prior to release.

Soluto is an excellent concept, and it's a program that casual users could definitely use on their own to help speed up Windows reboots. That said, I hardly ever reboot anymore -- my system is always asleep or hibernating -- so I'm not sure how much frustration it's really going to alleviate.

If you'd like another perspective on Soluto, check out Ed Bott's post on ZDnet.