Digital Home Thoughts: Soluto Attempts To Make PCs Less Frustrating

"The idea behind Soluto is to use the experience of thousands (or, ultimately, millions) of PC users to approximate the knowledge that a Windows expert gathers by trial and error. The software-currently in beta and free for the download-runs as a background service that watches your PC as it works, detecting slowdowns and trying to analyze the cause. By comparing those events and possible causes against a database of apps, drivers, and other software (cleverly called the PC Genome), the software can suggest solutions that you can implement with a click or two."

This sounds like a great idea. My current method for addressing slowdowns over time on my PCs is to simply reinstall everything every 9 months or so. This has gotten much easier since most PCs seem to have a restore partition built in, but it is still kind of a pain to reinstall all the other software. If I could run a small task in the background that could self-diagnose any problems I would certainly give it a try. The only potential catch is that they appear to be relying on the network effect to create their database of issues. So unless a lot of people sign up it might not be that useful. The Beta just addresses boot time issues, but over time Soluto has grand visions of making everyone's PCs run like they are brand new. I certainly hope they succeed.