Soluto, a cool program/service, measures boot time. Solid state disk wins big

When I got my new laptop with a solid state drive (SSD), I ran benchmarks comparing it to my old laptop and desktop with their hard drives. Windows 7 was faster than Vista, 64-bit was faster than 32-bit, and, most important, SSD was faster than a hard drive.

I've now run a final benchmark using Soluto, a program and service that analyzes and times the boot process. My new laptop, running 64-bit Windows 7 on an SSD loads 61 applications while booting in 36 seconds. My old laptop, running 32-bit Windows 7 on a hard drive loads 55 applications while booting in 2 minutes 32 seconds.

The SSD speed advantage makes for a qualitative improvement. SSD boot time is less than 25% of hard disk boot time, and it launches applications almost instantaneously. The responsiveness is relaxing. (The Soluto tag line, "enjoy your PC," is appropriate).

Soluto is a cool program/service. It shows all the programs you launch during boot divided into three groups: those you should not launch, those you may or may not want to launch and those that must be be retained.

You install Soluto locally, but it has a program description database to help you decide whether to drop a program. It also displays the percent of users who have decided to keep or drop a program. Finally, it keeps track of what you have taken out of the boot group, so you can add a program back with a single click if something unforeseen occurs.

64-bit Windows 7 upgrade -- disk reads are 25% faster

In a recent post, I mentioned that I had a new Dell laptop with a solid state disk (SSD) instead of a rotating magnetic disk (HD). I discussed the advantages of SSD and its relationship to Internet connection speed, and presented some rough benchmarks of disk speed. It was about twice as fast as my desktop computer and 4 times as fast as my old laptop with a hard disk.

Today I upgraded the operating system from 32 to 64-bit Windows 7, and re-ran the ATTO disk benchmark. As shown here, writes are about the same speed, but reads are 25% faster than with 32-bit Windows 7. I did not benchmark application load or boot time with the 32-bit operating system, but it feels noticeably faster now.

SSD: faster storage; faster Internet

I got a Dell laptop with solid state storage (SSD) instead of a rotating magnetic disk drive (HD). As shown here, the SSD is about twice as fast as my desktop computer and 4 times as fast as my old laptop with a hard disk.

These benchmarks are not 100 percent comparable (the machines had different configurations and operating systems) nor realistic (they only test raw read/write speed), but they show a clear advantage for SSD.

The speed difference is confirmed by my subjective sense of the SSD machine -- program load times feel much shorter.

The SSD should also consume less power and be more reliable than the equivalent HD.

It is interesting to consider the trade off between running network applications like Google Docs versus local applications like Microsoft Word as storage and Internet speeds increase.

Today I have a 3 Mbps link to the Internet at my home, so my old laptop storage access is about 100 times faster than my Internet connection. With SSD, that jumps to around 400 times, favoring local applications.

If, as the (conservative) FCC plans, I can upgrade my Internet connection to 100 Mbps, the pendulum will swing back toward network applications. If Google's vision is realized, and I can connect at 1 Gbps, network applications will look still better. Furthermore, once an application is "fast enough," additional speed does not matter.

On the other hand, SSD performance is also improving -- it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Which applications are already fast enough on the Internet that you choose them over local applications? Which are close?