Speed Up Slow Windows Startup and Boot with Startup Delayer

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.