Make your PC boot faster with Startup Delayer

A must-have for Windows users, Startup Delayer lets you designate various startup programs to run later so your machine boots faster.

Rick Broida Senior Editor

Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").

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Rick Broida

April 11, 2008 11:51 a.m. PT

Tired of waiting an eternity for your computer to boot? Malware could be the culprit, so make sure to run anti-spyware software. But another cause of slow booting is all the software that's trying to run the moment Windows starts. Startup Delayer takes a clever approach to this by letting you delay selected programs.

For example, I need my anti-virus and desktop-search programs to run right away, but Adobe Reader Speed Launcher? iTunesHelper? LightScribe Control Panel? They can wait. Using Startup Delayer, I can configure programs like those to run at, say, 2-minute intervals, starting a full 15 minutes after I've booted my system. Genius!

The program also acts as a startup manager, allowing you to uncheck programs you don't want to run at all. Startup Delayer a free tool, and absolutely essential for anyone with a PC that's slow to start. It's made a huge difference on my system.

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