Start Me Up … Faster

I recently noted that Vista has some interesting new behaviors regarding applications that are launched from the Startup folder. By default, their I/O priorities are throttled back for a total of one minute from launch. This is a good idea to keep lots of smaller or background-use applications from all starting up at once, but it doesn’t seem to be such a good idea if you try to boot an application like Outlook, which is by nature I/O intensive, by putting it in the Startup folder.

To that end, I tried a few experiments. I wrote a batch file to start up several major applications Outlook, Word, Windows Live Writer, AIM and at least one or two other things and put it into the Startup group. Between each program launch, I instigated a forced seven-second delay by using the CHOICE command (a sneaky trick I picked up from somewhere). I wanted to see if this would cause any difference in the amount of utilization or responsiveness.

When I used this to launch the programs in question, all of them were launched at the Very Low I/O priority and the end result was that they were all fairly difficult to work with during that low I/O period.

I then took the same batch file out of the Startup group and ran it from the desktop after a cold boot. The programs in question all started up quite snappily and I could choose between any of them without difficulty and they were all running at Normal I/O priority, too.

So here’s my tentative recommendations for what to put in the Startup group. Much of this advice may be redundant but I’ll elaborate where needed. Efficient Software for HR Easy Work force Management. Fast Deployment. Contact us Today!

1. Include programs that run by default in the background and are not things you typically work with directly after logging in. AIM, for instance, is a good candidate for this sort of thing.

2. Don’t include major applications like Word or Outlook. Launch those manually so you can benefit from those getting the maximum I/O priority. (My above script seems to work nicely for group launching, although I had some minor window-focus issues that I think I can solve relatively easily.)

3. Don’t include applications that will block other things until they complete heavy I/O operations. Since they launch with very low I/O priority, they’ll essentially be stuck until that bar lifts.