Hosting Sites Reviews is a new site – it appears to have only been around for a matter of weeks – dedicated to, yes you guessed it, reviewing UK web hosting companies.

There is plenty of competition already in the market and because it is so new, there aren’t any reviews available – this is a new site trying to get a foot on the rung. The owner doesn’t intend to contribute but, instead, rely on customer submitted reviews. This is has in common with many of the alternatives. Personally, I think this is an opportunity wasted. With so many competing sites, you really need some kind of USP. Customer submitted reviews can sometimes be their own worst enemy with people complaining about issues that really weren’t the hosts problem, or giving them full scores simply because they hadn’t experienced any issues up until then. The big tech review sites ignore Web Host reviews as well, so this would be a great opportunity to have the reviews led by a single person doing a fair comparison between the alternatives.

Hosting Sites Reviews only has a handful of hosting companies on their list at the moment – this list, however, is consistent with many other sites so I wonder if it has anything to do with their affiliate schemes. If a site wants to show itself as fair and all-encompassing, it should really give the opportunity to everyone. I use Memset and (grumble, grumble) Streamline.net but neither are on the list (I’d love to write a review of the latter!).

But, this is a new site and I’m sure it will grow and improve over time. Already is show promise by dividing the companies into categories – green, php, asp hosting, etc. It even has it’s own Facebook page.

Website hosting is rarely taken as seriously as it should be so more and more sites dedicated to the reviewing of these companies can only be a good thing.

Soluto calls itself “anti-frustration software”. A free program for Windows, and still in Beta, Soluto analyses your PC’s startup process and recommends solutions.

It’s been out for a few months now and I’ve been trying it on a number of computers, running XP and Windows 7 64-bit. All work without an issue.

You install it and it runs during each boot up, timing it and looking at the various startup processes. Simply go into the software for a breakdown of those processes. They are divided into 3 sections – “no-brainer”, “potentially removable” and “cannot be removed.” The latter category mainly includes system software (and Soluto itself). The other 2 you can do something about – either delay (make the program start later, when the computer is idle) or pause (switch off) each. In all cases you can view each program in turn, viewing what information Soluto knows about it, and make the decision yourself as to what you wish to do with it.

In the case of my home PC, running Windows 7 64-bit, my boot currently takes 1:58. Without being overly aggressive, I have reduced this by 3.3. Unfortunately, running Soluto adds 3 seconds so I’ve hardly gained anything.

To be honest, as an “expert user” I know exactly which processed need removing and how to do it and I can often remove more than Soluto can. However, for the amateur “dabbler” this is an ideal solution as it provides all the help you could ask for, including details on what other people did and even allowing you to edit program descriptions.

Lastly, there’s a flashy history screen showing how your boot times have changed over time along with key changes that were made.

Summary of Soluto

A good quality product that really can help the amateur PC owner. However, for the geeks amongst us this may be a frustrating solution and, as the saying goes, results may vary. For a free product, there’s no excuse to not at least try it!

Reviewed by David Artiss on 23rd March 2011.

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If you’ve installed Ubuntu as a dual boot with Windows then removing it isn’t easy (which is a shame that they make installation so easy but make no effort in assisting with uninstalling).

Removing the partition that Ubuntu lives on is the easy bit – sadly, it also removes GRUB, which is the menu that allows you to choose your OS during boot. As a result, you’ll simply get an error during the next reload and you won’t be able to even start Windows. Nice.

It would appear that you have to repair the Windows MBR (Master Boot Record) – this will restore the standard boot method. I found an excellent article on how to do it but, sadly, as this was on a Netbook (and is often the case with Laptops these days as well) I didn’t have any Windows installation disks.

You can use Win2Flash to create your own Windows disks on a USB stick – and there’s a great article for how to do this too.

However, after doing this and following the instructions in the first article, I found it booted just the same (at this point I hadn’t removed the Ubuntu partition, as I still wanted to be able to access Windows!). In the end, I came across a utility named MBRFix – this can be run from Windows and is a command mode utility to perform various actions on the MBR, including restoring it.

Install MBRFix and run the following command (assuming you’re running XP)…

MbrFix /drive 0 fixmbr

Then simply reboot to ensure it’s worked – the GRUB menu shouldn’t appear and XP should boot as normal. Once this is confirmed, remove the Ubuntu partition and then use a free partitioning tool to reclaim the space.