startup delay software

I just started using Virtual VP and VP Live last Saturday. Virtual VP-what a great program! I ran into a free program to delay the startup of specified programs on boot. It appears to work good. It is Delay Starter and can be found here: Available Products for download | r2 Studios

2 things I ran into:

  1. I start Virtual VP with no delay. I had WD set to start next,about 30 sec after Virtual VP, then VP Live, Weatherlink, etc. The WD data logger looked like it was frozen but after 7 minutes it did extract the data (only a few minutes worth). When I put WD after VPLive & Weathelrink all was good. Could just be something in my system interfering.

  2. You can set Startup Delayer to start a program minimized, normal, or max. VPLive did not like Minimized. It was listed in task manager but was not shown on the screen.

Have attached a screen shot of my setup. Hope this helps someone and I’d be curious to know if the program works ok for you.

Bill


Bill,
Thanks so much for the delay starter point. I installed it and tested it twice and it did as advertised each time. Keeps me from bugging Steve. Re: your starting sequence, I thought one of the problems with most starting schemes was that the sequence of startup was a crap shoot. Therefore I elected to give VirtualVP a full minute delay so all Windows trash has finalized before I start my weather programs. I also decided not to auto-start WeatherLink.
FWIW
George

George,

The 1 minute delay on starting Virtual VP sounds like a good idea. I may play around with that. Thanks for your input.

Bill

Bill, I don’t know what else you are using that PC for but IMHO a number of the items on the startup list are “windows junk” and could be deleted. Most likely saving memory and speeding startup.

Works like a champ…


startup-delayer-01.gif

nikoshepherd, your opinon is most welcomed. If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate it.

Bill

Startup delayer looks to be a very useful program, I’ve been doing that stuff by myself but this is almost too easy :lol:

As I wrote before, I don’t know how you use that PC and the following list is from the “almost dedicated WD PC” perspective so only you can judge whether these programs are important enough to you to have them running all the time. These are the ones I would question:

adobe reader speed launch = I wouldn’t have this running, and I would use PDF SpeedUp (free, but displays ad for their other software) to do a onetime (reversible) reconfigure of adobe reader to run it as efficiently as possible.

adobe gamma loader = I think this is a monitor color calibration program, do you need this running all the time?

ms works update = phone home and check for updates to MS works, IMHO the last thing a WD machine needs is
some process accessing the internet and downloading stuff on its own schedule. Just run microsoft update from their website.

Sunjavaupdate scheduler = another undesireable phone home and download.

qbcd autorun = related to quick books CD, I see comments like “Not required - infrequently used task that can be started manually if necessary”

kmw_run.exe = kensington mouse works, not sure what this adds to the regular windows mouse functionality via control panel.

FWIW :slight_smile:

nikoshepherd,

Thank you for the advise. I will do some reconfiguring of my startup programs per your suggestions. Thanks for your time.

Bill

The startup delay program sounds interesting. I’ll definitely check it out.

I agree with niko on trimming automatically started programs to the bare minimum. It seems inefficient to have a program running all the time unless it’s being used all the time, or at least very frequently.

I don’t even have Acrobat Reader installed anymore. It’s a gross example of bloatware. I use Foxit Reader http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ for pdf files
It’s much smaller (download is about 1MB vs. Adobe’s 27+MB), starts much more quickly, and doesn’t pop up annoying popups asking if I want to download junk I’ll never use or updates I don’t need. Foxit is free, and no ads.

Steve

EDIT… Steve beat me to it but at least we agree. :wink:

Anyone needing a PDF reader my want to check this one out. It’s free with no adds and you can save about 7 or 8 meg disk space. You won’t believe how fast it is. Here’s a little BS from their site but I’ve been using it for several months and so far all they say is true.

[color=red]PDF Reader a free reader/viewer/printer for PDF documents. Unlike Adobe

I also hate acrobat and did try foxit but (at least when I tried it) it didn’t correctly render all pdf’s. The pdf’s I had trouble with were generated by a db reporting program so it’s quite likely that foxit will do the job for most users.

If you are stuck with Acrobat Reader the pdfsu program I mentioned above really transforms it on slower systems by stripping out all the plugins and other junk.

I tried this once upon a time. I stopped using it because it had a bad habit of not launching every PDF I tried to launch. I never did find out why, but PDFs that wouldn’t load with PDF Speedup worked fine when I reverted to native Acrobat. YMMV.

I think that may have been a different program, the one I linked to runs one time and resets the options in acrobat, you don’t use it after that unless you want to reset the options.

I think it’s the same program. I couldn’t find a set of options configured using PDF Speedup that allowed Acrobat to be launched reliably. I don’t remember the details of what I tried/didn’t try now, but after quite a few configure options/deconfigure options to see a PDF I gave up on it.

With StartUpDelayer, I assume once I’ve decided what delays to use I can close it down and it will activate itself on the next bootup? Or is there something else I need to do?

Mine activates automatically upon reboot. There is a graphical and hidden version, but I actually never see anything from it when I reboot (I have it set to graphical).

Don’t really mind as long as it works… which it does.

My weather machine is a dedicated box, no antivirus, or any of that crud, bout the only driver that loads that would not be necessary is a sound thing, but I like the sound.

Wow, Startup Delayer is the first program I’ve not been able to run on my system. As soon as I click anywhere in the config utility I get the old Not Responding. If I try to start the program itself…nada, zip, nothing.

–Dave

Do you have administrative rights (assuming you are using WinXP).

It seems to like surfing the 'net, is it blocked by a PC firewall?

It goes looking for updates, so it will try to access the net. However, on first running it I refused access and it seemed to carry on without any problem.

Yes to admin. Turned off PC-illin. Going to try a reboot as soon as I see if the new ftpup is working.

Like you guys I need this to run to make VirtualVP, VPLive, WD, and WL to startup nicely.

–Dave