How to tell when Windows and all startup programs have completed booting?

Question

My machine (Windows 7 64-bit) takes about 3-4 mins to completely boot. Is there any way which will indicate that boot is complete, some kind of sound / pop-up, either by using Windows in-built feature or by any 3rd party application?

I require when both windows and all the startup programs have finished booting

I usually sometime sit and wait in front of the machine, that time could be better utilized for a quickie.

This is how it looks, when the hard disk light stops blinking:

Answer 1

There are several potentially helpful answers here, but I think there are two important points that haven't been made:

1. No, it is not possible to programmatically determine that Windows and all startup programs have finished booting. This is essentially the Halting Problem and no program out there will be able to answer the question "For this arbitrary program, at what point should we say it has been loaded?".

2. What is the actual problem you are trying to solve? All of the answers here attempt to find a solution to your question, but the question itself feels like it might be missing some important information. We want to solve your problem, not just answer the question.

Reading your question again and going just by what you've said, my response would be one of:

• Just don't worry about it and start using your computer. Foreground tasks are prioritized and unless you've got something really unusual going on it shouldn't matter if background tasks are running.

Or:

• Manually watch the system a few times and figure out the maximum amount of time it takes before the system is "ready" according to whatever metrics you have. Get a small timer program or script and add it to your system's startup. It can display a message or play a sound when the time you've chosen has elapsed.

This might not directly answer your current question, but hopefully it is helpful.

Answer 2

Why not using Windows Task Scheduler and the Event ID 100 to play a custom sound when Windows is really finished?

Under Triggers select "On an event" and

• Log: LogMicrosoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational
• Source: Diagnostic-Performance
• Event ID: 100

Under Actions select "Start a program" with

• Program/script: "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe"

• Add arguments: "%windir%\Media\Windows Logon Sound.wav"

  Event ID: 100   
  Decription: Windows has started up
  

  ^{Source Event ID 100: Windows Diagnostics-Performance}

Answer 3

Windows will treat boot finished if it was 80% idle (excluding low-priority CPU and disk activity) for 10s after reaching the Desktop UI.

To see the exact boot time use xbootmgr to trace why Windows boot slowly.

Answer 4

I have a free program installed that I have used for a long time, Soluto: https://www.soluto.com/

I am just a user, not connected.

It works for me.

It does a count down and allows you to select just what you want to load on boot.

It also allows you to delay starts.

Answer 5

Run this Python script on startup. It will play the startup sound once cpu usage has been below 20 percent for 5 consecutive seconds:

import subprocess
import time

# set these to whatever works for you
# sound will play when cpu load has been < IDLE_PERCENT for IDLE_TIME consecutive seconds
IDLE_TIME = 5
IDLE_PERCENT = 20

# you can execute any program you want by changing the alert function below


def get_load():
    output = subprocess.check_output('wmic cpu get loadpercentage', shell=True)
    load = output.split()[1]
    return int(load)

def alert():
    subprocess.call([
        r"c:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe",
        r"c:\Windows\Media\Windows Logon Sound.wav"])


idleSeconds = 0

while idleSeconds < IDLE_TIME:
    load = get_load()
    if load < IDLE_PERCENT:
        idleSeconds += 1
    else:
        idleSeconds = 0

    time.sleep(1)

alert()

Answer 6

You can add a sound to startup.

You can delay the startup processes and put a sound effect to be executed first. The tool Startup Delayer does this.

Answer 7

This may not be very effective, but it's cheap.

I usually look at the hard disk activity led (you can identify it on the case by something like a database icon), until the led stabilizes and flashes infrequently, then I know i can now use the PC without much lag. The hard disk is usually the PC's bottleneck, and if it is not being used heavily, then you have room for work.

Hope that helps.

Answer 8

I've never used it myself but Windows Task Scheduler will allow you to create a task that is triggered to run "At Startup" or "At Logon". You may be able to schedule a task to run a powershell script to access the Console.Beep() method of the .NET Framework. You may even be able to turn it into a decent tune.

From Hey Scripting Guy! Blog

[console]::beep(500,300)

Change the value of the first number to alter the pitch (anything lower than 190 or higher than 8500 can’t be heard), and change the value of the second number to alter the duration

Edit: As it turns out the Console.Beep() method may not work on 64-bit systems according to the MSDN .NET documentation. Tested beeping in a PowerShell Script and it works fine.

You may also wish to check into your startup processes. You can do this by running msconfig and clicking on services. You can also use the Sysinternals tool Autoruns.

Answer 9

By windows documentation last in load order is registry currentuser/runOnce (after start-up folder) ... but what ever load order is, some of programs can take long starting-up time.

So maybe watching CPU activity in batch file can be good solution:

@echo off
setlocal ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
set cpuLimit=15
set /a lowCount=0

for /l %%i in (1,1,30) do (
   for /F %%c in ('wmic cpu get loadpercentage ^| findstr "[0-9]"') do (
       echo %%i cpu-Load: %%c  ...lowCnt: !lowCount!
      if %%c gtr %cpuLimit% ( set lowCount=0
      ) else ( set /a lowCount+=1
         if !lowCount! gtr 10 (
            ECHO BEEEEEEP ... mplay32 beep.wav... or something
            exit
         )
      )
   )
   ping -n1 127.0.0.1 >NUL
)

... and BEEEPing after spoting that in last 10 cpu-load-checks, there was cpu-load below 15%. this batch file can be started by link in start-up folder, or better in registry HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Answer 10

You wrote:

«My machine (Windows 7 64-bit) takes about 3-4 mins to completely boot...»

A "normal" boot takes around 30 seconds including the access to the user account. There's somethings wrong and this must be fix. In order to fix it, you have to get de data. I suggest you two utilities to troubleshoot this problem:

1) Autoruns

With this one you're able to check every process, program, driver loaded during the boot process. Tka care: this is a very powerful tool and DO NOT delete items unless you know what's you're doing. But you may Uncheck (disable) some startup logon programs...

2) System Explorer

With this tool you're able to see all process started and the history of them until System Explorer is started. Also it's possible to scan all these process for security purpose (compared to a process database..)

Check this first them give us some feedback.

You may also check the services at startup with services.msc and the status of devices with devmgmt.msc (yellow triangle for defect devices,Hard disk in PIO mode instead of DMA, and so on...) in the Windows administrative tools...

Hope this help. Let us know.

Answer 11

I had been searching for something like this, and i found the answer

i will post the actual code later on probably, but here it goes

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394226%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

just save the contents of the last part as a vbs file and run it, you can poll each system event and extract its message being displayed, simple.

what one has to do to find the boot sequence completion is to have this script run only until the event id is '100' that corresponds to the boot completion process in the system events

refer: http://www.howtogeek.com/72420/how-to-use-event-viewer-to-find-your-pcs-boot-time/

So, when you have this script in startup , it will poll all events and wait for event id to be 100 and alert you . the same can be employed in any scripting tool like autoit

Just wanted all to know it. because when i searched for this. all i found was the windows task scheduler idea or soluto at the best. actually soluto stopped working on my x64 pc a while ago for some strange reason. so i wanted to do a script myself which led me to this final solution....