Soluto

No thanks, I already have better than that (True Image 2010). Before I try to recover XP to the new drive, I'm running it through HD Tune, because a sister drive to this one already has developed bad sectors on it. I wanted to compare the original scan that I made of it to now, but that was on the dead XP drive, so all that I have to go on is my own memory, and that is so bad that is was one reason that I got into computers in the first place, and sometimes I feel that was a mistake.

After uninstalling Soluto, I found that all of the tweaks that I had set with the program disappeared, so now I'm wondering if it is possible to set any program in the startup list to have a delayed start, like it was with Soluto, but without Soluto? I have a couple of startup items that use a lot of CPU bandwidth and time to initialize (namely SpeedFan and ObjectDock), but I do not want to have to start them manually each time myself. I either need a tweak or a switch to make this behavior permanent.

Mike Connor said:

If you are trying to reduce your boot time. then have a look at this;

How to speed up boot process under Windows Vista or Windows 7 - MSFN Forum

If you want to use delays for specific items;

Startup Delayer download and reviews from SnapFiles

r2 Studios - Startup Delayer

Regards....Mike Connor

My only misgiving about using something like this, is that I think that it would be good for delaying one program, but with multiple program that were all started together, it wouldn't make that much difference if it were done during boot, or immediately afterward. They would need to be spread out.

While typing this, I remembered a program called Batchrun, with which you could create a batch file, setting individual delays. I have never attempted to put it in the Startup folder, but I might experiment with that.

EDIT: I posted before actually checking your links, and it appears that Startup Delayer does have the ability to time individual programs, so I will try that.

After playing with the setting on Startup Delayer, I seemed to have found a timing that works for the two programs mentioned, but after numerous restarts, the boot time remains very irradic. Once, it booted pretty well, considering the history of my machine, and completed in ~87 seconds, but on the restarts both before and after that, it would sometimes hang on the login screen for as much as 3 minutes, and once on desktop, without loading any startup programs for about the same amount of time.

When looking at the degradation logs, it would usually list the four longest times, listing the amount of degradation from what it considered normal, but adding all of those together doesn't come close to the actual amount of delay that occurs in those instances. I'm beginning to think that the real problem is not any particular startup program, but something more basic in the startup itself.