When any flavor of Windows is booted up, there are many programs vying for the attention of your system resources. In addition to the Windows system files, many other programs you’ve installed are all trying to get loaded up…at the same time. This can result in a much longer wait than you’d like before your computer becomes available to you.
Duriosoft Indocor, based in Indonesia, offers Start-Q, Version 1.0 released on September 20, just about a week ago. Start-Q is designed to give you some control over this process via an attractive, easy to use interface.
The program can be downloaded for free (donations accepted) from the Start-Q website. It’s pretty small, and installs quickly and smoothly. A very obvious omission from the website is the lack of compatibility info, but we tested Start-Q on both Win XP and Vista and it worked well. Also omitted from the “online user manual” was the need for a reboot after installation. If you don’t, the program won’t function properly.
Once the program is open, all the startup items are visible in the top pane. You can drag/drop or double-click to move them to the startup queue at the bottom.
You can edit each item to wait a specified amount of time, fully load before moving on, or (careful with this one) set it to not move to the next item in the queue until the item has opened, run, and closed. Obviously, if you select this option on a program that stays open, the Start-Q queue will sit and wait forever.
You can also disable startup items from the Start-Q interface, but beware of programs that put themselves back in! These items should be left totally out of the queue to start on their own, with Start-Q instructed to delay the first queued item to accommodate them.
Be sure you read through the Online User Manual the first time you use Start-Q. It’s not completely intuitive, but one run through the short manual, and you’re be up to speed.
After saving and activating your queue, Start-Q will give you the option of having it run transparently, or with a small GUI. The GUI permits you to see, with a small status bar, what’s loading, and provides you with a “skip” button to discard the currently loading item, and move to the next. Once you have your queue set up the way you want it, transparent is probably the way to go. While getting things tweaked, however, the status bar is very handy.
On the XP and Vista machines, Start-Q worked a treat. I chose the “wait until..before loading next” option, and with only one exception, it flowed nice and smooth, the computer available to me during the loads. The exception on the XP box was a gaming keyboard driver that wants to connect to the ‘net and waits for the connection, but I have it blocked. I moved that one to the end of the list so it can sit and wait for the timeout all on it’s own. You’ll find tweaks that work best for your setup as well.
Overall, I feel Start-Q could be quite useful. Being a very new release, it’s not surprising, but slightly disappointing that I encountered a couple bugs, such as the program insisting on opening off the side of the screen, necessitating a drag back to the middle where I could see it.
Their website needs some work, too. The online manual references images that aren’t there, and in some places the “English as second language” is painfully confusing, in addition to being a bit short on information, such as the OS compatibility I mentioned earlier.
Start-Q may not be quite ready for mainstream yet, but it’s VERY close. It’s staying on the XP machine for a while, so I’m hoping for updates from Duriosoft!
-Bill Vincent
USB sticks are finding all kinds of interesting uses among them now is the ability to create a bootable USB drive for Windows 7 and Vista. While this might not be a great need for a lot of people I know that some of WinExtra’s will find this to another handy utility to have in their toolbox.
Recent Comments