Soluto

I think they discontinued their version of windows as the website only have links to download for Android and IPhone only .

I stopped using Soluto when it started getting pushy about logging in, using cloud features I didn't want, etc. It seemed more and more (a bit) malware-ish to me as it became bigger and bigger. I liked it better how it was before, just analyzing my start-up apps.

[Edited by RobertL87, November 25] I found out that Glary Utilities is able to delay programs manually.

I like the concept of Soluto, but it is kind of intrusive with too many notifications in the current version (Aug 2012).

Love it since launch. Hated when they changed to browser user interface. :/

Soluto claims to do several things, but the main function is to give you a breakdown of what runs at boot, how long it takes, and provide options to delay or stop it. Why not just use msconfig? Soluto has an integrated wiki for each process which you can edit yourself (submissions are reviewed by the team) and their database records what percentage of users leave a process in their boot- these two things mean that for the vast majority of your processes, it's very simple to decide whether to stop or delay its launch or leave it to run at boot.

So far so good, but there are certain decision that the Soluto team has made which limit the usefulness of the program.

Most importantly, there are many processes which Soluto is not "yet" able to manipulate. Some, such as Windows system processes, are understandable. A second class is those processes which are underrepresented in the Soluto database- this is where the ugly starts. If you are the first Soluto user to encounter a process, you will not be able to delay it, even if you know for a fact what it does. Furthermore, if within a few days many other users do not encounter the process, it will be marked as rare and be locked forever.

This is the major glaring flaw which motivated my uninstall of this otherwise rather pleasant app. If you have processes which are not "popular" with the Soluto userbase (determined by an arbitrary metric) you will never be able to delay or otherwise affect their boot-time behavior. There is no advanced user mode. There will never be one. The team has stated their priority is to avoid confusing novice users.

It's not like Soluto is completely useless. The information is very helpful, and when you can delay apps, it works like a charm. Overall, I cut down my boot-time from 6 minutes to 2. If you have no way of controlling your startup sequence (besides msconfig) I certainly recommend Soluto. But if, like me, you are not entirely clueless, you will eventually become frustrated with being forced to rely on the crowdsourced database, even when you happen to know something the database does not.

Other two functions Soluto offers are removing or disabling browser extensions to speed up the browser launch and trying to fix crashing applications, both with a similar crowdsourcing approach. The first seems like a useless feature- it's not nearly as difficult to figure out which extensions you need and which you don't. The latter sounds nice, but my programs rarely mess up, and when they do it's mostly locking up as opposed to outright crashing. Most software nowadays sends crash info to the devs and/or Microsoft, and most of the time when programs crash I tend to know exactly why, because I did it. With Soluto in particular, I had maybe 6 crashes in the few past months, and none have been resolved. The whole idea seems over ambitious and I'm doubtful the database will ever grow enough to be useful.

Soluto is the best boot manager out there. Msconfig is complicated and scary if you don't know what you're doing, and even 3rd party apps can't compare to Soluto's simple and clean user interface. I would recommend this to anybody with Windows.