Lag time on windows boot - ways to decrease?

Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. You are running Windows Insider Preview version, which is not supported officially. But, I have forwarded your questions/problems to the Stardock Support team for their assistance. Please keep an eye on this thread for any updates. We appreciate your feedback and patience.

Thank You,
Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

thanks for the response and assist. Keep in mind though that this is the May 2020 version already released to developers and manufacturers. 

Having the same issue, after login to windows it takes several seconds until the desktop appears. Looks like as if the explorer.exe takes very long to load because of Fences.

Windows 10 Pro version 1909 (18363.836) btw.

Hello,

I've got the same issue.

VERY long lag on startup, on my new very performing machine (I7Core-9700F, RTX-2060-8Gb and 64Gb system memory)

Hello,

Fences runs in the Windows Explorer process so some minor delays in booting may be expected with high icon \ Fence found on the desktop.

That said, future versions of Fence will look to improve on this. 

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

Hello Sean,

Got only 4 fences with 12 icons on my desk...

It needs 6 to 10 seconds to get the desktop ok.

Thx

Is that the 'VERY long lag' you are referring to?

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

As far as specific lags on my PC, currently it is about 6-10 seconds where before it had been more than 20 seconds. As far as the number of icons in a fence, I also have very few per fence but some of those icons are shortcuts to folders with more file. Also, I have the onedrive portal setup. I may disable that and check the boot time? 

 

Quoting YvanP,

reply 6

It needs 6 to 10 seconds to get the desktop ok.

Is that the 'VERY long lag' you are referring to?"

Yes it is.

Ok, I understand it seems a short delay time.
But today, with a SSD, Windows 10 starts in a few seconds. Then the extra delay introduced by Fences is relatively important.

To be very complete, I've noticed that this delay varies.
It's particularly long with changing of user on a multi-users configuration.

When you start allways on the same user, the delay is acceptable.

It's like if Fence should rebuild its configuration with user changes.

Thx.

 

Just curious... Why on this earth are you restarting/starting your machine all the time? If you're not, and haven't got 10 seconds to spare, have you got time to use your computer at all?

We don't do it all the time, but if you do it is annoying because you can't immediately start working with your desktop.

Without Fences that doesn't happen and in times of NVMe SSDs where everything is basically started immediately this is a noticeable delay and inconvenience.

Yes, it is not a blocking issue, but it is an inconvenience that makes me (or us) stop using the product. The added animations in fences giving it the rest for me. I am currently trying to justify working with it because I just bought it ... but if someone would ask, I could not recommend it to friends at the moment.

Actually....what you are seeing with Fences is the real time it takes to complete loading the Windows shell aka explorer.exe.

I believe the actual process delay of loading Fences is 0.2 of a second...as with any program loading...quite ignorable.

Now, if the shell loading process left the displaying of desktop icons as the last stage you'd see no difference at all, but Microsoft wants to give the impression that the desktop has finished before it really has and shows them early...;)

This.

(i dont want to hijack this topic, but this post from Neil might shed some light on the issue mentioned in this topic)

Hello all,

Surely this problem isn't a very problematic issue. That's just we tried to help to achieve a very nicely functional application.

Fences is nice. We have paid for this even if it could be easily found on a p2p well knew site...

The developer needs to be paid for this job.

This explains a lot. I tried the setting, unfortunately this does not really "help" - it just shows the actual loading time of all startup programs.
The problem with that is that you can't actually use the desktop earlier than otherwise. It would actually be cool to keep the current default windows behavior BUT startup fences earlier (like an exception to this behavior, but keep other startup programs as is).

Not sure if that would be (easily) possible and probably more like an enhancement. But good to know why this actually happens.

My 2 cents... I think that giving all users access to all the shortcuts in Fences at an earlier stage in the boot process, would result in a myriad of errors/crashes because Windows has not yet loaded all services those programs may be dependant on to function properly or at all. Have you all considered that?

Noticing a difference these last few days. Unsure if there is a Windows 10 update that has impacted this but once at desktop, the icons will not appear unless I interact with the desktop in some way, such as right clicking. Been running with Fences for years and this is the first time I've experienced this.

If that were the case the same things would happen if you launch something from Start10 or the native Start menu.

Could be, although in practice I never saw a problem by starting a program immediately after desktop is available. In reality the time span is quiet small for that to happen (on NVMe SSDs even taxing applications only take a few seconds to load) and most interactive applications probably don't rely on background services or other programs to be started already and I am not even sure if services (who are not set to "startup delay") are delayed by that feature at all (only read startup programs).

So if you immediately start a program once the desktop is available it probably just works like the autostart programs, just out of order.
Well, as this boot up delay is not a serious issue I will keep the default windows behavior for now, because it still allows me to immediately start programs via task bar if needed and feels much snappier.

Although theoretically this could be the case, this definitely should not happen. I am using the argument Neil used in the topic i mentioned before. Windows has a delay of 10 seconds before its starts all the programs. Atom computers with a non ssd disk might take much longer then 10 seconds for things to finish. Basically this means no service is guaranteed to be done after 10 seconds. Afaik, slow computers are not inherently less stable then fast ones. So it should be absolutely safe to either omit the 10 seconds or lower it or just let fences start immediately without the 10 seconds.

Arguably its very nice that all the update-checkers and stuff like that only start after a delay since its much better to be able to use the computer immediately then to know immediately if there is a new version of program xyz. I think this is the reason why the 10 seconds is there in the first place. Its not needed, but its nice.

NB i didnt look at any microsoft documentation to verify.  Just using plain logic and Neil's argument.