how to make a program run at startup on any computer

First, search for “Task Scheduler” in the Start Menu. To access the Advanced settings, you need to use the normal task creation wizard.ġ. However, the option to delay tasks is within the Advanced settings, and those settings are not available in the basic task creation wizard. The task scheduler has proper options and makes it easy to start tasks with a delay in Windows. Though I’m showing this on Windows 10, the same method works on Windows 7 and 8, too. Start Scheduled Tasks with Delay at Startup Let’s find out how you can delay scheduled tasks in task scheduler on Windows. That’s just one use case for one particular scenario. That’s more than a forty percent improvement without losing any functionality. By delaying the launch of not-so-important startup programs using Task Scheduler, I was able to reduce the startup time to below fifteen seconds. To improve the startup time, what I did was disable a select few startup items via task manager, added those programs to the Task Scheduler and configured it to launch them with delay at every system startup. However, I want these programs to start automatically. I can disable some startup items to improve the startup time. Typically, for me, the startup time is anywhere between twenty-five to thirty seconds. As you can guess, all these startup programs increase the Windows startup time. For instance, on my Windows system there are many startup programs like Snagit, Enpass, OneDrive, FastKeys, etc. Note: This works in Windows XP and Vista as well.The ability to delay task execution in Task Scheduler is very useful. If the program has been written to minimize to the notification area in the system tray it'll show up there otherwise, it'll minimize to your taskbar. The next time you start the program, it'll start up minimized and out of the way. Step 3: Select 'Minimized,' then click the OK button. Step 2: Click on the drop-down menu under Run. Step 1: Right-click on the shortcut of the program you want to start minimized and select Properties.

Snagit doesn't have a setting to allow it to start it up minimized, so we'll configure Windows 7 to do it for us. Snagit is a screen-capture program that doesn't need to be run in the foreground. In our example, we're going to configure TechSmith's Snagit software to automatically start up in a minimized window.

To avoid having to manually minimize a program every time you run it, you can configure the program's shortcut so it will automatically run minimized.

Some Windows programs are better run in the background and out of the way.

How to make a program run at startup on any computer