Startup Delayer - the best way to delay programs that starts automatically

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If you reached this page then you're interested in finding a way to delay some programs that starts when you boot your PC. If your computer is slow and takes several minutes to be ready then you have to read this article. So what's happening with a computer that has a lot of programs installed and takes so much time to be ready ? Think about it this way, you are going to a supermarket and you have to buy one bottle of water, naturally you are going to carry that bottle easy. Again with the second bottle you can carry 2 bottles then think about 3 or 4 or even a full pack. This is a situation when you need help and this is exactly the same thing with your Windows. When you have one or several programs, your PC can handle them easier and it can load your desktop pretty fast. Things could get ugly when you have a lot of programs installed since all of them are trying to load in the same time and your computer CPU ( processor ) will be overwhelmed by so many processes. So let's start to see how can we delay programs that starts automatically without affecting our PC stability or security. First of all we need a free and clean program that is able to help us. So, download Startup Delayer from here, the latest version will always be listed on this page. Make sure to download the setup file in a location on your computer and then open the program. The first window that you will see is called "license Agreement" and you are advised to "review the license terms before installing Startup Delayer". Make sure to read their entire license terms and if you agree with them press the "I Agree" button in order to start the setup process, here you have a picture with the first setup window :

Licence Agreement terms

Now it's time to choose the folder in which to install this program. As you can see, setup will install Startup Delayer in the following folder "C:\Program Files\r2 Studios\Startup Delayer". To install in a different folder, click "Browse" and select another folder. Click "Next" to continue.

Choose Install Location - Choose the folder in which to install Startup Delayer

Now it's time to select the Start Menu folder in which you would like to create the program's shortcuts. You can also enter a name to create a new folder. I would recommend you to leave this option as it is if you don't have a good reason to change the default folder and to continue with the installation. Make sure to click on the "Install" button and the installation will start and it will be ready in a couple of seconds.

Choose Start Menu Folder - Choose a Start Menu folder for the Startup Delayer shortcuts

If everything went well you should see a new window that says "Completing the Startup Delayer Setup Wizard" which means that this program has been installed on your computer. Click "Finish" to close this wizard and as you can see if you leave the option "Run Startup Delayer" checked the program will be loaded for the first time.

Startup Delayer has been installed on your computer

Here it is, this application started for the first time on my computer and as you can see he identified all programs that boots when I turn on my PC. As you may notice, the interface it's pretty intuitive and says "To Delay an Application, Drag and Drop it here".

Startup Delayer launched for the first time

As you can see, I draged Adobe Reader and droped it on that small window and the program automatically assigned 12 seconds as a delay for him. He did this automatically but wait we can control the time manually for each application.

How to drag and drop a program inside Startup Delayer

We were talking about controling the delay time for each application in manual way so we can accomplish this by doing a right click with our mouse and click on "Edit" or we can simply double click and it will open the same window that can be viewed in this picture which allows us to manually specify the time for a delay, like 59 seconds for example. You need to click on "Save" button to save the time value for a program.

Edit Program - This window allows you to specify a delay manually

What happens if we specify a wrong delay for a program that we didn't want it to be delayed such as an antivirus, well this picture shows you that you can always eliminate all delays and start over. To do so make sure to click on the second button called "Actions" and click on "Start Over - Shift+Del" and all limitations are being eliminated.

We can always start over if we did something wrong

Now, a smart idea would be to delay each program in Windows XP or Vista on a different time. For example, check out the following picture which shows you that I entered different time values for each program. So, one program will be delayed 59 seconds, the second one will start at 50 seconds the next on at 45 seconds and so on...in this way we can avoid any bad experiences with our system. It has some logic here, if you would setup the same delay time value for all programs your PC would start faster but he would be overwhelmed by a lot of applications that are trying to start at the same time which makes this program completely useless and that because of an human error. So make sure to remember this, I guess this is the main reason why when they created this program they have added that feature to drag and drop each program since you cannot have two identical values for the same application.

Adding different time values for each program delay

If you want to test this software you need to activate the program first so make sure to add different time values for each program and then go to second tab called "Actions" then choose "Activate Startup Delayer" then make sure to choose between "Use the hidden version" and "Use the graphical version".

Choose how to activate Startup Delayer - Use either hidden version or graphical version

If you will choose the hidden version, all programs that you selected to be delayed will be delayed but you will not be notified by some notification window or anything else when you will start your PC. If you choose the graphical version, when you will start your computer you will see a small window that will display the remaining amount of time for each delayed program. Now you need to restart your PC in order to see the results for this software.

In conclusion the best way to delay programs that starts automatically is to use Startup Delayer which is a handy utility, a free and complete program that will enable you to easily set a later start time for any application on your Windows XP or Vista. This article also teach you about how to install Startup Delayer on a PC running Windows ( we have tested this application on XP and Vista and worked great for us ). Also, this program is free, clean and if you can, the developer of this program would appreciate any donations if possible.