Some would say that the title of this article is as obvious as saying “Don’t throw bricks at your windows”. Bearing in that you can buy some extremely tough varieties of glass, (!) the problem many people find is that it’s hard to put into practice.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, in fact I imagine you may have spent a couple of hours troubleshooting your relatives computers over the Christmas holiday, wowing them with your knowledge of msconfig and its friends, but you can’t help but think it should be easier.
Well to put it bluntly it is. There’s a free program out there called Soluto which can tell you exactly what programs are slowing your computer down, creating an easy and user friendly way to filter out the crud that builds up on your PC over time.
It’s very nicely put together, once installed you’re prompted to restart your computer so it can analyse the programs which load when your PC turns on. It then presents the information it finds to you, splitting the programs into three categories, No-brainer, Potentially Removable and Non-removable.
This is where the beauty of Soluto lies, even when presented with a list of what’s hogging your computer’s resources it can still be hard to tell whether that application or process is necessary or not. Soluto taps into a database it calls the PC Genome to find information on all the applications it finds on your PC. It then gives you advice on whether or you should pause (the application won’t load until you ask it to), delay (the application won’t load until after your computer is fully up and running) or leave in boot (it will continue to load when you first turn your computer on).
There are pretty expansive explanations of what each application does, including how long it takes your PC to load it and pie charts showing what course of action other users took. Once you’ve decided what to do all you need to do is click the appropriate button and you’re sorted.
Now you may be thinking that it’s obvious what a program does, why would you have it installed otherwise. In many cases this is true (although you will be surprised how many of these load in boot unnecessarily). There is however quite a few cases where you may have no idea what something is doing.
All in all I think this is a great program, if you decide to give it a go do be careful, you don’t want to turn off your anti-virus by getting too click happy! I think it works really well, I saved myself almost 20 seconds, and that’s from someone who is pretty careful about what I allow to load. When I was home over Christmas I managed to save my family almost 3 minutes!
So Soluto definitely gets a thumbs up from me. If you decide to give it a go, or indeed know of another program or method, do let me know what you think in the comments below.
Download Soluto Here