Here are the results from my recent encounter with the tool on all 7 working machines currently in my home office (or at my disposal):

Hopefully, this more extended report helps to put some teeth into my earlier contention that Soluto, while interesting, is not yet ready for production use. Success on 3 out of 7 machines is a rate of under 50% (42.85% to be more exact): by itself, that tells me the software has a way to go before it will appeal to the great unwashed on the one hand (that is, normal home PC users) or to IT professionals on the other hand.

The boot-time savings were lowest on my least powerful machine (my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, with its Atom N280 and 2 GB RAM), and somewhat less than thrilling on my high-end HP HDX9200 notebook (11 seconds off an original boot time of 2:28 is a 7.4% improvement: nice but not earth-shaking). My rock-solid, fabulous Dell D620 notebook accrued the largest gain with 25 seconds off 1:35 (26.3% is a pretty substantial improvement, in my book).

The D620 Notebook got the best boot boost from Soluto

Soluto is definitely worth keeping an eye on, and even, keeping one’s fingers crossed that the program emerges from beta into truly commercial status. If and when that happens it’s going into my standard Windows toolkit for sure. Right now, the program is like the famous ditty about the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: “When she was good, she was very, very good; But when she was bad, she was horrid.”