Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

molotov — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:40:01 GMT

I did a bit of playing around with this (SetThreadPriority, Vista, and Autostart Locations @ http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com/2007/11/setthreadpriority-vista-and-autostart.html). It may be interesting to note that autostart apps launched via the Run key in the registry (or the Startup folder, as the referenced Vista Compatibility Team Blog posting indicates) also have their child processes "boxed", eliminating what would seem to be an easy way to "defeat" boxing.

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

JM — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:42:59 GMT

The link you gave actually contradicts what you wrote here (slightly). It says that thread priority will be fixed at normal, that is, attempts to increase the priority will fail, which is not quite the same as reducing the priority. If I read that correctly, it should not affect a well-behaved application which wasn't boosting its priority in the first place.

And I'd like to point out that you've just told people how to programmatically circumvent the feature. It's just not trivial, and requires elevation. Don't think sufficiently poor-behaved applications (or rather programmers) won't do that anyway if they want to, though.

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

Vista Startup — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:13:00 GMT

The Vista startup experience is one of the worst things that Vista brings to the table. Granted, it may have nothing to do with running startup applications, but the end-user startup experience is nothing short of terrible - even on high-end hardware.

It's so bad, in fact, that I recommend to everyone I know who's using Vista, to put their machines in standby or hibernate and never reboot (until of course the never-ending, monthy security patches require it). Vista contains 30 scheduled system tasks and at least 12 of these run either during system startup or at user logon.

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

Mark Sowul — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:02:08 GMT

It's particularly terrible after installing Windows Updates, which is pretty much the only time I reboot, thus making it seem to me that the system startup was consistently terrible.

(Also another unfortunate correlation with Windows Update/setup programs that require a reboot is the absurd amount of time it takes to restart - my assumption as to what happens is that they kick off a shadow copy, and then while rebooting, the new feature of Vista that allows a service to finish its work during shutdown causes it to take forever to do so until the shadow copy is finished).

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

Xepol — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:17:41 GMT

I was wondering why my startup script was acting like it got booted in the head. Now I know.

Boxing -> interesting term for windows startup.

Still reminds of waiting for an Amiga 1000 to boot up, build a big ram drive, copy 2 800K floppies to said ram drive and then finally load the workbench.

No floppies, but not really any faster either. Shame really. At least my Amiga could decide that the ram drive contents were safely recoverable and bypass the floppy copy if you didn't do a full power down or boot a custom OS floppy....

I guess the message here is : the process still needs work, keep at it.

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

anonymous — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:14:55 GMT

Yes, overall I have experienced faster logons and availability but when updates are installed, it's "Please wait while Windows configures updates" all the way before shutdown AND the next logon. Maybe MS decide to worsen the patching experience.

re: Startup Programs on Windows Vista: Inside the Box

smartie — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:40:53 GMT

interestingly that in Windows 7 the default setting for "delayed apps" is 0 and not 60 as in vista.

I am more and more convinced that Win7 is only a highly tweaked vista. I will go thru all the registry settings and implement them on a vista box just to see if the performance will be equal.