For as long as I can remember one of the biggest ‘gripes’ of my friends and family has been the speed of their laptops\PC’s boot times, and their application response time. 9 times out of 10 these issues are caused by applications starting at boot up that either the user has never used, or are some kind of update check facility for common applications. Either way, it’s almost always beneficial to tweak these startup apps to suit the users computer use habits.
Which is where applications such as Soluto earn a big space in my ‘PC Repair Utility Belt’. Soluto can be compared to simple boot up timers….. Or can it? NO! Soluto really is in a realm of its own. The Soluto GUI has been designed to ease even the most technaphobic user into power user tweaking.
Among other things, Soluto monitors your PC or Laptops boot process, and then offers suggestions on what applications you can remove, delay or pause from your PC’s start up process. This can often shave off 2 to 3 minutes of frustrated boot times. But wait… It doesn’t stop there, any applications you remove from the boot up process will then (obviously) no longer be running in the background, thus improving your PC’s overall performance! All Soluto‘s suggestions are driven by what members of Soluto community decided to do with the highlighted app, thus meaning it’s always learning and always offering the best solution!
Soluto is often the first thing I turn to, when a user presents a laptop or PC with performance issues. However – in the past, doing Soluto diagnostics remotely has often been quite challenging. It’s surprising what the user sees compared to what is actually on their screen. So yet again the clever boffins over at Soluto HQ have come up with a soluto which fits the bill perfectly.
The recently launched Soluto ‘dashboard’ offers up an ‘at a glance’ overview of all the PC’s you support, enabling you to drill down into each machine; diagnose and better still tweak the boot sequence, check for and install outstanding updates, install handy software remotely, check the machines core and hard drive temperature, tweak browser add-ons and check the machines battery health. With even more functionality being developed and tested as you read this actual post!
The dashboard is perfect for this time of year, aiding family and friends without even stepping out into the cold.. You can send invites to install the Soluto client to your friends and family, and as soon as it’s installed you can ease their frustrations! What more could you ask for!??
Currently the Soluto dashboard is a ‘closed’ invite only system.. But I have some good news!! The nice friendly Soluto people have offered me up an invite code to give to my readers! So what are you waiting for? Head over to Soluto and when prompted enter the invite code: mikesentme
As with all Soluto solutions, I am excited to see whats next to be unveiled and I am confident this all new dashboard is going to save me lots of time, and my friends and family lots of frustrated rants at their misbehaving PC’s.
Apple have just released the latest firmware revision for the 802.11n AirPort Express, 802.11n AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule models. This has been released to resolve some of the bugs found in the previous release:
An issue with performance on overlapping wireless networks
An issue with AirPlay audio streaming
An issue with configuring multiple entries for DNS servers
If you already have a copy of the Airport Utility for iOS, you’ll be pleased to know you can update your device without having to boot up your pc or mac! Launch the airport utility and tab on your device, you will then be giving the option to download and install the update. You will then get a progress screen much like the one to the right.
Another perfect wireless implementation. Thanks Apple!
So in a first for Apple, and a first for the iPhone – iOS 5.0.1 is now available to download without wires.. Yes.. That’s right, you can download the latest iOS release straight from your device!
Now – there are obviously some caveats to this, you need to be on wireless for the download to initialize, this makes sense really! As the iOS installs are generally around 200-300MB in size, downloading over 3G could take a while!
So – to get yourself a copy of iOS 5.0.1 all you need to do is connect your device to a wireless internet connection, head over to settings, tab on General, then Software Update.
You phone will now head off to Apple’s update servers and show up a screen much similar to the one seen on the right.
If you feeling confident, and have plenty of battery to spare tab on Download and let it do its thing!
Once your device has downloaded and unpacked the update, it will automatically reboot and start updating itself as if it was connected to your PC or Mac.
Seamless! Strangely however, iOS doesn’t seem to (currently) do push notifications of the new update. So you may need to keep a keen eye on the net, to see when updates are released. This is something I am sure they are working on, and will no doubt be released in future iOS versions.
Happy Updating!
So last night a good friend of mine came over with an iPhone dilemma.. Stuck with iOS5 and a need downgrade.. We tried various solutions with non working completely. We then decided to try and jailbreak the device, to try and work around the issue. Knowing iOS5 jailbreaks are still in there very early stages we knew this would be tethered, but accepted its fate and carried on anyway.. The jailbreak went without a hitch, using RedSn0w all looked well! Apart from the fact it still didnt resolve the issue and now we were stuck with a tethered boot device for no reason at all.
On we went trying to un-break the device, using my MacBook pro, and as many ipsw’s as we could find.. All of which failed, with pretty much every error message found in iTunes. The most common one being “This iPhone is not eligible..” this proved to be the most persistent. Even standing when we tried to do the stock iOS5 install..
However.. The fix wasn’t as google suggested, it had nothing to do with the hosts file.. An TinyUmberella couldn’t help.. So I booted up my Windows 7 VM, installed iTunes 10.5 and straight away it restored the iOS ipsw without any error messages or questions asked!!!
Now, I’m not sure if it was OS X lion, or the fact I’d been messing with TinyUmberella all night long, but one things for sure.. The VM fixed it.. An I didn’t even have to touch my hosts file!
So my tip of the day is.. If iTunes doesn’t want to help, try another machine be it physical or virtual, before spending 4 hours trying to figure out why!!
Back in March I published a blog post (previous post) about Onyx for OS X. This app removes all the ‘complicated’ command like operations out of keeping your mac maintained. Using a simple GUI interface onyx provides access to several maintenance tasks at the click of the mouse.
This morning news has hit the wire that an update has been released to this popular app. The update brings with it a couple of new features, and some bug fixes:
- Show/hide QuickTime Player 7 Movie Inspector at launch
- Force enabling AirDrop
- Bugs corrected in the Parameters > iTunes panel
- Bugs corrected in the Infos panel
- Xcode isn’t required anymore to install the Network Link Conditioner Preferences Pane
- If the Spotlight icon is hidden, it remains after repairing permissions from OnyX
You can download Onyx over at Titanium’s Software website
