It’s been almost two months since we released our first feature, the boot beta, and I thought it’s a good time to share a bug report with you guys and gals, as well as give you a short update. We're a start-up company with a beta feature, so problems are expected, especially taking into account the surprising massive distribution we reached.

As you can imagine, most people arriving here to our support community have a problem or a question. The vast majority of our users (probably more than 90%) never get here because they don’t have problems, and people who do get here feel as if Soluto’s full of bugs because that’s all people are talking about here. But that’s life, and we’d rather talk about the problems in public than hide them.

We’re sorry if you had a shaky experience with Soluto and we thank you for sharing your problems here – it helps us prioritize our work and helps us understand what bothers you more. Your patience and understanding have been amazing – over email, phone and even remote assistance sessions. As most of you know, we are a small start-up company and it’s just mind-blowing for us to experience your level of participation and good will.

Stabilizing our current beta that focuses on the boot is taking us longer than we expected. In parallel though, we’re also continuing the work on our next big features, gradually starting to cover PC frustrations beyond the boot, on the way to cover the vast majority of PC frustrations that occur during normal operation of a PC. And soon, in addition to a smarter client application, we will start publishing our statistical PC Genome data, which will be revolutionary. We just ask for a bit more patience... :)

If you want to learn more about our plans you're welcome to watch our interview with Robert Scoble, here: http://scobleizer.com/2010/05/24/why-...

We have released several versions in the past 5 weeks that solved most problems we had at launch. We expect to release our next version, that will solve most of the remaining problems (listed below), in a couple of weeks. We intend to hold a large scale alpha testing session prior to the release, if you want to take part in this alpha test, you’re welcome to sign-up here: http://www.soluto.com/alpha/sign-up

Below is a list of the most common problems still existing out there. If you have any of them, know that they will be solved in a couple of weeks. If it takes more than a couple of weeks please try to be forgiving with us, as we don’t get much sleep and are poorly fed...

Here are the known problems fixed in the next version:

Can’t work behind a proxy/firewall: In fact, Soluto works well behind most proxy and firewall configurations. In our next version we’ll support even more, and we’ll gradually try to cover all of them.



Synchronization stuck at 47%: This problem usually occurs when your PC has several applications that weren’t previously analyzed by the PC Genome, and at the same time many others are installing Soluto and synchronizing with the PC Genome. This problem has almost completely disappeared due to several bugs fixed around it, but it still happens to a tiny percentage of users. If it happens to you and you installed Soluto before June 15th, try uninstalling and reinstalling Soluto (download the latest version from Soluto.com) and it may solve the problem. In the next version we’re rolling out a change that decouples part of the discovery process from the synchronization process, so the problem will be totally fixed.

“Analyzing” or “Under Maintenance” forever: There are several reasons for which Soluto may be stuck “Analyzing” or “Under Maintenance”, related to connectivity problems or just plain bugs in our software. If it happens to you and you installed Soluto before June 15th, try uninstalling and reinstalling Soluto (download the latest version from Soluto.com) and it may solve the problem. The solution has already been coded and tested, and will be deployed in our next version.



Uninstall does not revert all changes: Uninstalling Soluto should revert the PC to the state before Soluto was installed. This means that if you paused and delayed applications, once you uninstall Soluto all these applications will return to your boot. For a couple of days, we had a version that had a bug in this “cleanup” process. The version number was 1.0.760.0 (you can check if you have this problem by Ctrl-clicking the tray icon and verifying if you have this version). This affects a very small percentage of users and in most cases is harmless, but some users who removed important elements and then uninstalled may suffer from problems. If you do have this version and if you paused or delayed any applications, we recommend that you start Soluto, point the mouse to the blue area with the removed applications, click 'Undo All', uninstall Soluto and then reinstall the latest version from Soluto.com. That should take care of things. If you already uninstalled Soluto and think some applications were not returned to the boot, please write us at support@soluto.com and we’ll send you a separate clean-up tool that will revert everything. This should not happen in the version already available for download on our website.



Can’t start Soluto after boot: The symptom of this problem are that after the “fold” reports that the boot has finished, right clicking Soluto’s tray icon produces a menu where all options are grayed out. This problem happens when our service fails to start and may be caused due to several reasons. If it happens to you and you installed Soluto before June 15th, try uninstalling and reinstalling Soluto (download the latest version from Soluto.com) and it may solve the problem. For our next version we already solved several additional cases where this problem happened.

Delayed applications not launching: This occurs in some cases when you delay applications and they don’t launch automatically after boot. We are familiar with this issue and already solved it in the next version. In the mean time, we recommend putting those delayed applications back in boot. Please note it’s a rare problem, and it doesn’t mean that we generally recommend not using the delay mechanism.

Bad categorization or identification of applications: Some applications are not categorized or identified well. Common occurrences of this problem include some applications that appear in the Orange bar that should appear in the Gray bar, or vice versa. Rarer occurrences include simple errors, most notably the mistaken association of unrelated processes to OpenOffice for example. The next version includes massive improvements to the categorization mechanisms. With it, we will also start the review process of Wiki contributions that we were unable to start until now because we were 100% focused on increasing the scale and stability of the server and application.

Can’t install Soluto: This one is becoming rarer as days go by. There are a couple of common causes for it. Either it’s tied in one way or another to the proxy or firewall issue mentioned above, or has something to do with the .NET installation or with the Windows Installer service. Try to repair the .NET installation (from Control Panel) and reinstall Soluto. If you still can’t, please drop us a note at support@soluto.com, we really want to catch these cases.

If you have any additional support issues please share them here or write to support@soluto.com. Please also feel free to contact me directly at roee@soluto.com.

Great stuff coming up, stay tuned :)

Roee Adler
Chief Product Officer