Soluto

After reading several comments endorsing this program, I decided to give it a try. I'm not fond of the idea that it transmits data online elsewhere for analysis, but I didn't read that until I had installed it. Therefore, since I already have it, it seemed prudent to give it a try anyway.

The problem is that I can't seem to get it to work. From what I read, I think that it requires rebooting from the Soluto UI for it to begin functioning, but a left click on the System Tray icon does nothing. A right click on the icon produces a menu, with the option to open it, but all that does is to produce a splash screen saying that it is loading, but nothing more.

When I manually rebooted, Soluto didn't appear at all, until I select it from the Start Menu. Before I uninstall it and forget it, I wanted to see if anyone has an idea that would help, as the concept of boot analysis is something that I like.

While typing the last paragraph, the firewall popped a dialog saying that it had blocked Soluto from doing something, but that was so long after the last reboot, I doubt that it had to do with this problem. I had also set the firewall to permit the program to allow all activities, so apparently this was something that the firewall considered taboo regardless of settings. The popup only appeared for a couple moments, so I didn't fully comprehend it, but I think that it mentioned userinit as what Soluto was being blocked from.

Soluto needs to connect to its database (PC Genome) to pass on the boot events it captures in your machine, and based on that generate advice. Read this faq.

FAQ | Soluto

So you may need to explicitly permit soluto in the firewall. Other than that, just try uninstalling and reinstalling.

If you are interested in more detailed boot analysis, you can just check the boot performance degradation events in the event viewer. Heres a walkthrough.

Use Windows 7 Event Viewer to track down issues that cause slower boot times | TechRepublic

I shall look over your links, but I got curious about userinit, and found this article:

Userinit

The odd part is, that when I go to that location in the registry, there is no key called Winlogon. As I said, I set Soluto to have full reign as far as the firewall is concerned, so not only do I not understand the lack of the key, but also why the firewall would be protecting a key that doesn't exist.

seekermeister said:

I shall look over your links, but I got curious about userinit, and found this article:

Userinit

The odd part is, that when I go to that location in the registry, there is no key called Winlogon. As I said, I set Soluto to have full reign as far as the firewall is concerned, so not only do I not understand the lack of the key, but also why the firewall would be protecting a key that doesn't exist.

Click to expand...

The winlogon key is very much there. Make sure you're looking in the right place.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Yes? Show me where:

You need to click on the little triangle at the left of "Current version" in the left pane, that'll expand that key. Then just scroll down to winlogon.

Okay, got it. The article that I mentioned above, speaks of substituting a program in place of userinit. Is that what would be required for Soluto to work?

I'm still working with the Event Viewer method of diagnosis, but it is not helping much. It seems that for each boot, that it lists a different process, rather than a pattern of one process continually reappearing. The boot time back on 8-29-2010 took ~ 142 seconds, and the last one took ~ 176 seconds. According to Bootracer, it took ~ 2:29. All of the boot times in the Event Viewer are marked as critical, so I'm at a loss as to how to approach this. Obviously, I have never been impressed with the boot time from day one.

No, just allow an exception in the firewall for soluto and uninstall and reinstall soluto.

Thing with the userinit bit is many users feel (rightly so) that they dont need soluto to run at every boot and just run it per choice. Personally I remember running soluto a long long time back, taking in what it said and then tweaking that part, after that I just uninstalled it.

The part about reinstalling Soluto I understand, but not the part about allowing an exception in the firewall. As I said, I did go to the Application Rules and set it to allow Soluto to do whatever it wanted, and that changed nothing. With the firewall that I have (Outpost), it seems to make new rules each time that a program is installed, so I doubt that any rules that I have currently set, would be operative on reinstallation.

Right, if soluto has free internet access, just uninstall and reinstall.

I guess that Soluto is a lost cause for me, because I did just reinstall it, and it is exactly the same as before. During the uninstall, the firewall popped the same dialog, saying that it had blocked Soluto from userinit, as it had after previous attempts to use it. Maybe it's just not compatible with my firewall, but if so, I don't think that I'm compatible with it. There is still no hide nor hair of Soluto since rebooting, and with the indications that I've gotten from the Event Viewer, I doubt that it would pinpoint a cause for the problem anyway. (Oops!, the firewall finally popped it's blocked dialog on Soluto again).

Since boot time has always been slow since I installed W7, and never improved even when restoring from a True Image recovery, it doesn't seem as though there is any easy solution.

You can try adding an exception for the soluto exe file in the firewall. Alternatively, you can disable the file temporarily.

I disabled the firewall, and that hasn't helped with Soluto, but it did show an improvement in boot time. It dropped from an average of ~ 179 seconds, to ~ 140 seconds. Going back through recent boot times, there were some that were as much as 289 seconds. I may have to consider using a different firewall, but I'm reluctant to do so, since I have a lifetime license for this one. Even at 140 seconds, it is still pretty slow.

Finally, I got Soluto to work. Disabling the firewall after Soluto was running didn't help, but having it disabled before Soluto ran did. The first analysis said that the boot was 2:40, and after resetting a couple of apps, it pared it down to 2:24. I had it pause wmpnetwork, SpeedFan and ObjectDock. The biggest slowdown was SpeedFan...which I suspected even before using Soluto. Pausing these items did not make quite as good of an improvement as Soluto first claimed that it would, but even 16 seconds is an improvement. These times were with Outpost disabled, so I think that reenabling it will increase the time by ~ 36 seconds. I may have to consider replacing it afterall, but I'm not too thrilled about any of the other firewalls that I'm familiar with.

Regardless of what I do, it appears that my boot time will never be very good.

I got curious about the previous userinit issue, and rechecked the reg key to find that Soluto had added itself to it. I guess that is why that it didn't work previously.

This might be of use to you:

What

<http://itexpertvoice.com/home/what%E2%80%99s-taking-so-long-how-to-fight-slow-startup-times-in-windows-7/>

Regards....Mike Connor

Thanks, but that appears to be a rehash of the article that I linked previously. Your article goes into more detail, but from scanning over it, it doesn't appear to offer anything new. I have a tendency to think that my problem is not a particular program or driver, because as I said, the very first boot on this system took ~142 seconds. The odd thing is that after using Soluto to pause some programs that slowed the boot, my last boot time was even worse (3:18). One step forward, two back. I'm beginning to think that my hardware and W7 simply don't like each other.

I have found that Hauppauge TV tuners add quite a bit of time during boot to load their drivers.
In my case, I have 2 HVT 2250's and they take almost 20 secs each. I disable the 2250's in device manager when I need to speed up the boot for application installs or troubleshooting. Also mapped network drives that are not available will add significant time 7-10 secs in my experience.

seekermeister said:

I'm beginning to think that my hardware and W7 simply don't like each other.

Click to expand...

Indeed, a lot of variables here, and a lot of "trial and error". I am down to just over 90 seconds with fairly standard hardware, ( No SSD on this machine). Not that it bothers me much, as long as it runs reliably I don't really care how long the boot takes, as long as it is not excessive.

Regards....Mike Connor

Actually, the only reason that I started out on this course, is because I was bored and looking for something to do, but I should have known better, because every time that I go troubleshooting, trouble starts shooting back. I had to shutdown the computer while I took a hike for physiological reasons, and when I returned and powered up, the hard drive that XP resides on decided to die. In the process of taking care of that, a couple more hurdles were thrown my way. Sometimes trouble can be a real bear, and he's not just any common bear either.

Now I've got to hope that my XP backup image works, so that I can recover it to a different drive. I hate to use a 1TB drive in this fashion, but that is all that I have handy. XP doesn't have anything in it that matter too much, but all of my documents were on that drive also and they are not imaged. I would try using my recovery software, but with the XP drive plugged in, it was causing W7 to have problems also, and it didn't appear in the Device Manager, so I doubt that my software would work on it.