Speed up your system boot

A tiny software startup from Israel is trying to make your PC less frustrating. Soluto which is currently in beta achieves it by speeding up your boot time and fixing annoying system slowdowns.

The basic idea behind Soluto is to use the experience of thousands of PC experts to help the masses.  This software runs as a background service that watches your PC as it works, detects slowdowns and tries to analyze the cause. By comparing those events and possible causes against a database of apps, drivers, and other software it can suggest solutions that you can implement with a click or two.

Once you've installed the software and rebooted your PC, Soluto springs into action, tracking every single process that runs during the boot process, and then allows you to easily drill down into the list of processes to see exact times for each one. Further the applications are grouped into "No-brainer" or "Potentially removable" groups.

Once you've identified an application, you can drill down into the details and control it directly from this screen. You can Pause the application, which will effectively remove it from the boot process. Or you can Delay it, which will get you to a working desktop a little quicker. The graph next to the buttons shows you what other users did, so if you really have no idea what something is, may be you can use the wisdom of the crowd.

You can also go into the advanced section to find more about the process such as when you installed it, why it runs in your boot, Soluto recommendation, how much of your boot time the process consumes etc.

Overall the software worked really great. Its very lightweight and so far its recommendations have been reasonable. It has helped me bring down my boot time to 1:16 minutes.

I think the real innovation that Soluto is bringing to the table is in its PC Genome knowledgebase. Eventually, it will consist of a database of applications derived from the Soluto agent installed on users’ PCs.

Check out this short video which does a great job of explaining the software, how to use it, and how it can help you troubleshoot the boot process:

Good luck with Soluto!

Sync Firefox across your devices

If you have got multiple Firefox installations across different computers then these 2 add-ons are a must.

Firefox Sync

This Add-on from Mozilla Labs lets you stay in sync with your Firefox across different computers.  You can access your bookmarks, history, passwords and even open tabs across all your devices using this Add-on.

Siphon

This extension syncs a list of Add-ons between browsers, with easy installation and deletion buttons. It also saves your Add-on list if you ever need to reinstall Firefox. Once you have created an account and logged in, Siphon keeps track of what you have installed, and also what you remove or add later on. You can choose whether to sync the changes, or keep them on the local Firefox installation only.

I was using Xmarks for a long time to sync my bookmarks and passwords. But recently they announced that they are shutting down and I decided to switch to Firefox Sync. But it looks like they are trying to come back from near death by evolving to have both a free component and a premium component. Lets hope they survive the tough times and emerge profitable.

Also for those who need a cross browser password syncing, I recommend LastPass. LastPass is a secure password manager for all your web passwords. Like other web-focused password managers, LastPass puts all of your individual passwords behind one master password.

Do you shutdown your PC at night?

Do you normally shutdown your PC at night? Or you forget it most of the time? In this era of “Going Green”, everyone is expected to shut down down the PC and save energy when you are not using it. That’s right – only when you are  not using or when the PC is idle.

We are humans and we tend to forget. Here’s a nice solution to let the machines do the job for you. You can configure Windows to automatically power down at night, if you’re not using the PC at that time. All you need to do is to create a task to shutdown (or hibernate) your computer, triggered after a certain time, but dependent on idleness.

Let me walk you through the whole process in Windows 7.

First open up Task Scheduler  (in the start menu type task scheduler) to create the new job. Click on the Create Task link on the right-hand side.

In the create Task window, give the task a name, and check the box for “Run with highest privileges”.

In the Triggers tab, click New, and then setup a daily schedule to fit your needs.

In the Actions tab, click New, and then enter shutdown in the Program box, and /S into the parameters box.

In the Conditions tab check the box to only start the task if the computer is idle for more than 30 minutes. Also choose to stop the task if the PC isn’t idle.

In the Settings tab choose to restart the task every 30 minutes if the task fails.

Save the task and that’s it – you don’t have to worry about shutting down your PC at night anymore.

Remove Items from Right-Click Send To Menu

Has your Right-Click Send To Menu Items have grown big? Do you want to remove some unwanted Items from that list without downloading any tool?

In Windows 7 you can do this easily without any hassle. To remove items, first simply navigate to the following directory to find all Send To items.

C:\Users\{YourUsername}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Select the items you want to remove and hit the delete key and that’s it.

Tip: If you are having trouble remembering the path/directory then try this. Just type “shell:sendto” in Start Search and hit Enter.

Is your computer’s power profile optimized?

Have you been getting a low battery back time on your laptop lately? Do you know whether the battery is completely worn out and needs replacement? Or is it some power hungry programs and setting that is killing your batter backup time?

Off late I had problems with my battery back up time and I decided to do some research on this. I came across several articles and small utilities that is helpful to make the decision process easier for you. It turns out that the modern day batteries come up sensors capturing a lot of detail including the wear level and you need only some program to read it. If you are running Windows 7 on your laptop you have good news. Windows 7 comes with a “Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report” in the OS itself.

Here’s how to create a detailed report.

Type cmd in the search box to launch the command-line program.

Right click on it and click Run as Administrator

At the command prompt, type powercfg –energy and press enter

You can see the message “Enabling tracing for 60 seconds”

At the end of this tracing you will receive a brief listing of the the energy efficiency problems found on your computer. But it won’t be detailed. However it also creates a more detailed report in a file named “energy-report.html”. You can find the path to this file in the command's output. The detailed report will provide you enough details to decide whether you need to change the battery or make some adjustments to your power settings. For example, in my case I learned that my battery has work out 44% and hence it recharged only to the 56% of its designed capacity. You can find this out by going to the Battery Information section of the report. The report is a bit technical and is recommended only for advanced users.

For better management of your battery, I recommend using a small utility called BatteryCare. Its is a software created to optimize the usage and performance of the modern laptop's battery. It monitors the battery's discharge cycles and helps improving its lifetime. The features include monitoring of discharge cycles, automatic switching of power plans, control over windows services during battery power and CPU/HDD temperature reading. 

You can find more details about it at BatteryCare website. It is definitely worth checking out.

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