Faster Autostart PinballX with Win8.1

[Censored]

Hi!

I installed PinballX on my Win8.1 Cab and everything works fine (Incredibly easy to set up frontend).

PinballX is started at Windows startup too, but is there a way to start PinballX a little bit faster?

Don´t get me wrong, its not the loading time I want to shorten, its the time when PinballX is started, because the Desktop is shown about 10-15 sec until the PinballX loading screen appears

[Draco1962]

You may want to go into msconfig and see what is loading on startup and disable any unnecessary programs or processes there, TBH, it isn't a PinballX issue and you may only shave a few seconds at best.

[Censored]

I knew that its no PinballX issue, but I hoped that there is a trick to start it earlier.

Well, I´ll use a Loading screen as wallpaper and hide the icons and the task bar to hide windows as good as possible.

[Draco1962]

If you are not crazy abou the Metro UI you can always download classic shell (Gives you that kinda Windows 7 feel and start menu). Not sure if it will help any.

[Itchigo]

That's all I can think of too, is msconfig. But the computer that runs my cab is external, and runs other things too. (Not a dedicated setup).

[Draco1962]

There is one option you may try for programs and processes that you cannot disable would be to set them via Services.msc to Delay Start (some, however, may cause undesirable results as they may affect other programs/services/processes that are dependent upon%

[Censored]

My Cab already boots to Desktop instead of the Metro Shell (Otherwise PinballX won't do a "clean" autostart).

I think the delayed start of some services is a good idea, I´ll try it next year...

[Zeiram]

I'm running Win7-64 and notice that PinballX takes a lot longer to autostart than Hyperpin - like 10s of seconds longer. It doesn't bother me, so I haven't spent time debugging it, but I thought the feedback might be relevant to this thread.

[Draco1962]

Many variables can come into play, bei it hardware and/or software preloading. For some it is less of an issue than others. Thanks for the feedback!

[Draco1962]

@Censored - here is a fairly reliable place to start regarding services. I have found Black Viper to be fairly reliable in the recommendations he has made over the years.

[Tom Speirs]

Note if you use the built in autostart for PinballX it does intentionally add a delay to stop other startup apps stealing focus. So its quite feasible to optimise the startup.

[Censored]

I disabled the auto startup in the Pinball Settings and used the Task Sheduler to start PinballX, FutureDMD and the Keywiz Uploader at startup

FutureDMD with a 5 sec delay and PinballX with 7 sec (otherwise they would be shown on the wrong screen).

Now my Cab and PinballX are up and running in 26 Seconds (instead of 46).

The only problem left ist the Keywiz uploaded because it seems that the Uploader Window needs focus to upload.

[Draco1962]

Good deal! Sounds like you are on your way to a faster startup. Shaving 20 seconds is a great start. Not sure how to address the Keywiz uploader.

[Censored]

Well, I simply changed the VP and PinballX Keys to the default Keys of the Keywiz, so I don't need the Uploader any more (now I know why many people use an iPac instead of the KeyWiz)...

I am very happy with the 26 seconds, so I won't tune the startup any more

[Zeiram]

  On 1/1/2014 at 12:34 PM, Tom Speirs said:

Note if you use the built in autostart for PinballX it does intentionally add a delay to stop other startup apps stealing focus. So its quite feasible to optimise the startup.

I wondered if something like that was affecting my startup. Thanks for the info!