Speed up slow Windows startup and boot with Startup Delayer
Posted on September 19, 2008 at 5:45 am
Is your Windows startup or boot time very long? If you have a lot of applications that startup when Windows loads, you may have noticed that your Windows startup is very slow. Earlier I wrote about speeding up your PC by going into the MSCONFIG tool and turning off useless startup programs.
However, even with lots of startup applications disabled, you may still have a good number that you want to run when Windows starts. Each application with eat up CPU cycles and may also have to read and write from the hard drive (hence the constantly blinking hard drive light when loading up). In this case, you can actually delay the startup of programs till after Windows starts.
Startup Delayer is a cool program that does just this for you, it speeds up your boot time by allowing you to delay or stop the startup of programs. By default, Windows will try to load up all programs simultaneously when Windows starts, causing lots of contention and overall slowness.
Once you install Startup Delayer, you’ll get a list of the current applications that load up automatically on startup. The nice thing about the program is that it has two modes, safe and advanced. In safe mode, you only see programs that are on the Program List and cannot delete programs from the startup list. In advanced mode, you can actually remove items if you do not want them to start up and you’ll see other programs listed, such as system programs.
To delay an application, simply click and drag it to the bottom window. When you do, you’ll see that the bar at the bottom is actually a time scale for the time the program load should be delayed. Drag the program around to delay it to the desired amount of time.
As you can see, I’ve delayed the SunJavaUpdate program to launch 6 seconds after Windows starts. What you want to do now is to keep adding programs and spacing them out so that they all start at different times.
You may want the heavier apps to load later on and lighter apps earlier. For example, you can delay SunJava by 10 seconds and if you have Yahoo Messenger installed and several other messengers, you can delay them by 20 to 30 seconds since they take up more resources.
You can also go to the Actions menu and choose Space Evenly and the program will automatically add all programs and space them out evenly across the time scale.
Once you have set the delay times for all programs, you need to activate Startup Delayer by either clicking on the red triangle icon that has SD written in it or by going to Actions and choosing Activate Startup Delayer and then choosing either Use Hidden Version or Use Graphical Version.
Now restart your computer and hopefully you should see your startup time decrease as those programs are not loading immediately! Quick and easy way to speed up a slow Windows computer! Enjoy!
» Filed Under Computer Tips
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“Is your Windows startup or boot time very long? ” — Can anybody answer “No” to this?
I like the concept behind this application, where you can delay the startup of a particular program for x number of minutes. I just wonder how this will work out on an on-going basis. But, it is definitely worth a try. I’ll check it out.
Thanks for sharing.
Ramesh
The Geek Stuff
Thanks for the info, this is a great tool.
Hi, I’m struggling to find out how to return a startup to its original location by deleting it from Startup Delayer’s control. I’m using the program in safe mode as I don’t want to delete the startup completely, just return it to it’s original location. It says you can perform this function under safe mode but I’m unable to find out how! Am I missing something obvious? Any advice appreciated.
Does this work with most Windows OS?
How do I download this Startup Delayer program? I would like to use it, can’t find the link. Thanks.
In the article where it says “Startup Delayer” (in blue font) – that’s a link to the developer’s website.
I have to say that on first restart my computer took much, much longer to startup, specifically when applying computer settings, is this normal?
If it happens again I’ll have to uninstall it.
@Nathan
I wouldn’t say that’s normal, but it’s possible that after a couple of restarts you may find startup speed improves somewhat.
It’s certainly best not to move all your startup entries to Startup Delayer, especially the system ones as you could just make things slower. I personally only use it to delay the startup of 3rd party apps that load in the system tray to give the system processes time to load properly beforehand. I don’t delay my anti-virus either.
If you want to return any entries back to their original location, in the current release, all you need to do is to remove the delay.
So set the delay time to 0, or drag the slider all the way to the left (which should say, ‘Not Delayed’ or ‘No Delay’).
This will automatically move the item back to where it came from.
Hope this helps.
Great info! I will try it out and let you know how it goes. Hopefully it reduces the time it takes for Windows to load because mine is slow!
Wow, that was suprisingly useful! I have this program that uses Oracle as a back-end running on my laptop and having that bad boy load up after a minute allows me to at least get into my computer and use it! Thanks!