Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Put simply, the Soluto's value proposition has been its simple application that, once downloaded, allows the millions of PC users across the globe to quickly run diagnostics on their hard drives to locate all things wonky."

Soluto's original software available via download was designed to help users find and identify problems with printing, add-ons, speed and performance issues, etc. on the computer in which it was installed. With three million downloads without advertising, the software was considered a hit. However, with their new beta version, Soluto has decided to go web based and change focus to what their user base was mainly using the software for. It turns out the typical user of Soluto were mainly doing repairs for other people's computers, namely friends and family.

The new version will be web based and can do all of the functions of the old install based version remotely. Users will be able to see non-responsive apps, install apps or browsers, monitor system vitals, etc.

If you are ever called on by a friend or family member for CTO duties, you may want to take a look at Soluto.

"Soluto has long been an awesome tool to speed up your system boot, but they've just released a huge update that also speeds up your browser and collects crash reports from all its users to help you fix them quickly."

Programs are not perfect. No matter how battle hardened they are, no matter how careful you are with themm programs crash. Usually when you cmoe across a crashy program, it involves a search for other users who have had similar problems and what solutions they have come up with. Soluto (among other things), automates this process. While some elbow grease is still required to fix the computer, it is nice to have some of the tedium already done for you when bad things happen!

"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.