The theory behind Startup Delayer is simple. Delay the auto start of programs in Windows to avoid bottlenecks during the start of the system.

Most versions of the Windows operating system offer no program loading priorities during startup. Microsoft has changed that behavior for services under Windows 7 and Vista, which can be configured to start delayed.

Programs on the other hand that are added to the startup locations of the operating system cannot be configured for delayed startup.

That’s where the third party application Startup Delayer comes into play. It offers to switch programs from normal startup to a delayed startup.

All programs are listed under normal startup by default, but can be moved to the delayed or disabled groups instead. Programs in the disabled group are not started at all, while delayed programs are started when the system meets specific requirements. The default requirement is a 90% idle disk activity. This can be changed to a cpu idle threshold or a manual delay directly in the main application window.

Delayed programs are displayed in order and you may need to use drag and drop to bring the programs in the right start-up order.

You can switch between user accounts at the top, handy if you need to change autostart items for other users as well.

Individual program properties are opened with a double-click on a program in the startup list.

Startup Delayer displays many information about the selected program which may aid you in identifying programs. The delay, wait and advanced tabs offer additional configuration options.

You can switch between automatic and manual delay under the delay tab. Those are basically the same options as in the main application window, with the difference that the pulldown menus under Manual Delay are now listed as hours, minutes and seconds (which they are not in the main interface which can leave users wondering what the numbers stand for).

The wait tab allows you to configure if startup delayer should wait for a specific event before the next application in order will be launched. The program can wait until the delayed startup program has terminated or until a user confirmation.

The advanced tab finally offers controls to change the window state and program priority plus options to launch the program only on specific days of the week.

The free version of Startup Delayer offers two additional features. You can access all running tasks and system services in tabs in the program interface. You can use the information to find out if all of your startup programs are running on the system. A handy feature is the ability to search for a specific process or service on the Internet.

How effective is it to delay the startup of applications? That depends largely on the computer system and the number of applications in the various autostart folders.

Users benefit the most if they have lots of applications in their autorun folders. Even more so if the computer is not the fastest. You may not benefit at all from delayed startups if you have only one or two programs in your autorun folder. It may even slow down their start up a little bit considering that Startup Delayer is added to the system start as well.

The interface language can be changed in the program options, but the quality of the translations is bad as machine translation was used by the developer.

You can download Startup Delayer from the developer website.

The same principle can be applied to Windows startups. A lot of software programs try to load during startup: Firewalls, Antivirus scanners, Office indexing and hundreds of others all load at the same time because Windows has no way of prioritizing startups.

Enter Startup Delayer. What this software does is to list all applications that are started when Windows starts. You can then delay the startup of applications that are not system critical. I would for instance instantly start my security applications but delay the start of lesser important programs such as Office, iTunes and other applications of that kind.

I try to keep my startup list as clean as possible and only load Antivir at startup which means that I do not have to use this on my desktop PC. A friend of mine however who likes Norton, Office and all those major bloated applications is using Startup Delayer successfully for some time now.

Update: A review of the latest version of Startup Delayer has been posted here on this site. Feel free to check it out for screenshots and information on what’s new and changed.