Lengthy boot times must be one of the greatest irritations you can have with any PC. Not only can Windows take an age to load, but then the hard drive thrashing can continue for minutes, in some situations, slowing down everything else you want to do.

Investigating exactly which programs are being launched along with Windows is a good first step to resolving this situation, of course. A tool such as Autoruns will reveal all, and disabling or uninstalling surplus applications should make a difference.

But if your launch time is still too slow then the free-for-personal-use Argus Boot Accelerator may be able to help, by making the entire boot process just a little more efficient.

When Windows starts, for instance, it normally loads all your startup programs more or less at the same time. And this results in a lot of wasteful task switching and disk thrashing as the system tries to process every launch task simultaneously.

With Argus Boot Accelerator, though, you’re able to run your programs sequentially, and in a defined order. This means important programs can be placed at the top of the list, so they’re loaded and available first. While every individual program load time should be significantly faster, as your drive heads won’t have to fly around the disk quite as much, and Windows won’t be wasting as much time on excessive task switching.

Argus Boot Accelerator can reorder and optimise your startup program launches to cut boot times

This isn’t just about sequential loading, though. There are many other tweaks you can apply to optimize the startup process.

Like Startup Delayer, for instance, you’re able to set a delay time which defines how long the program will wait before it loads the next item.

You can set the process priority, too. Choose “above normal” for an important program, say, and it’ll get more attention from Windows, and may load a little more quickly.

And you can also set the default window start of the program (normal, minimized or maximized); choose to launch it only when the CPU is idle, and even have some startup programs run only on particular days of the week.

This can all seem a little overwhelming, especially if you’re used to boot time optimizers which do all the work for you (just suggest you disable this, uninstall that and so on). Argus Boot Accelerator isn’t difficult to use, but how to best configure your system is left entirely up to you (and figuring out the optimum setup could take quite some time).

Still, the program can deliver some benefits just right away, by perhaps allowing you to load a couple of important items at the very beginning of the boot process, while giving more trivial tools a “below normal” priority: this only takes two or three minutes to set up, but could make a noticeable difference right away.

And if you then return to Argus Boot Accelerator over time you can use it to manage your startup items, maintaining your system and hopefully keeping its launch time to an absolute minimum.