How to delay the start of a service?

goofyfoot2001 said:

I see virtually ZERO difference between automatic and delayed start. I find it HARD to believe NO ONE has found a way to DELAY the start of a service by some time period without going around their elbo to get to their a$$.

If your system is on a SSD, you would probably not notice a difference if you delayed 2 or 3 services. But from a HDD it is noticeable.

I use WinPatrol to delay the startups. It is the easiest.

To do it simply with stuff that's already on your machine you can use a .cmd batch file. Make a shortcut to the .cmd file and put it in the Startup folder. You can open the StartUp folder by using this command in the Run box:
shell:startup

I would set the shortcut to run mnimized. To use the batch below set the service to Manual:

(Name the file whatever you want MyServiceDelayed.cmd or whatever)

Code:

@echo off
rem the number after -n is the delay in minutes
rem as shown below the delay would be one minute
ping 192.0.2.2 -n 1 -w 60000 > nul
rem use sc.exe to start the service
sc start ServiceName

of course use the real name of the service you set to Manual previously instead of ServiceName

edit: of course the delay is in addition to how long it takes Windows to get around to running the batch file after login.

I've used something like this in batch script:

c:
timeout /t 300
net start "your service name"
exit

The above command runs the net start command 300 seconds (5 minutes) after the script is invoked.

Save the above commands in a .bat file and schedule to run when the computer starts with the task manager. The account used to schedule in the task manager will need "log on as a service" and "log on as a batch" rights in the local security policy settings.

In my case it is used to start a service that fails to automatically start due to another dependency service not starting in time.

You can also set the service to start manually, so it doesn't start right away, and then automatically start it with the scheduled script.

If using timeout as delay in a batch it's a good idea to also specify /NOBREAK to avoid return when any key is pressed. Timeout is simpler. But the ping technique has the advantage of working across many flavors of Windows. For Vista and later seems fine though.