Control order of startup programs?

uncle_rufus · 30 Sep 2016 at 09:38

Does anybody know of a way to have better control over programs launching at startup? In particular this is the situation:

At startup I have Rainmeter, and OHM (Open hardware monitor)... Rainmeter pulls some information from OHM via a plugin... If OHM hasn't started when Rainmeter tries to access it then it causes an error and I get an annoying popup from the plugin...

So can I somehow make it so that startup always launched OHM first and waits until it has started before launching Rainmeter?

(The only way I could think of would be to write a short Python/powershell script which does this, and add that to startup instead of OHM + Rainmeter separately, but that seems quite a clunky way to do it)

russell664 · 30 Sep 2016 at 10:02

I use software called 'Startup Delayer' - never let me down before. Might be worth a shot.

uncle_rufus · 30 Sep 2016 at 10:04

russell664 said:
I use software called 'Startup Delayer' - never let me down before. Might be worth a shot.

Looks good - thanks! I'll definitely give this a go if there's not an in-built way to do it

LizardKing · 30 Sep 2016 at 10:41

If rainmeter runs as a services then just change it from "automatic" to auto delayed in the services.msc mmc
it add a 30 sec delay to its startup

uncle_rufus · 30 Sep 2016 at 12:33

LizardKing said:
If rainmeter runs as a services then just change it from "automatic" to auto delayed in the services.msc mmc
it add a 30 sec delay to its startup

I'll have a check when I get home - thanks, this sounds like it might be what I'm looking for

Nikumba · 30 Sep 2016 at 15:20

If neither of those work, create a batch file with a wait in it, though nowadays would be done in powershell I guess

uncle_rufus · 30 Sep 2016 at 18:29

Hmm okay, so neither Rainmeter or OHM are services - so that route is out for now... I did think either a batch file (or probably Python since I know it well) which launches both with a delay might be the way to go... Will have a look thanks

The only other thing I could think of would be with the task scheduler can I schedule a task that will happen on startup?

marc2003 · 30 Sep 2016 at 18:58

Just use a batch file. Timeout is in seconds. Use start because if you didn't, the batch file would wait for program a to close before continuing.

Code:

start "c:\path\to\a.exe"
timeout /t 5
start "c:\path\to\b.exe"

uncle_rufus · 30 Sep 2016 at 19:53

Does that also detach the processes etc. so that when the batch file is done they don't die with it? I'll give it a go

andshrew · 2 Oct 2016 at 22:48

uncle_rufus said:
The only other thing I could think of would be with the task scheduler can I schedule a task that will happen on startup?

Yes, set the task to begin on start up and then use the delay task for x seconds/minutes. Then just point it to run the program directly with no need for an intermediary script to launch it.