Normally there's still a long way to go, from switching on and "booting" your computer to having it ready for productive work. If you have to do that day-by-day, the loss of time adds up quite heavily. And if you have your most productive hours in the morning, like me, you will be glad to save any minute you can.

Fortunately you  can  do that. Configure your computer to do  automatically  (almost) all those things you would have to do by hand after start-up. Thus, you switch on your computer, do some other things for a few minutes, and when you sit down before it you can start working full throttle right away.

To get that, what you have to do is quite simple. You only have to prepare the operations to be done automatically and to create a shell link to each of them in the  AUTOSTART  directory of your system. That directory is executed, one entry after the other, every time you "boot" your computer. ("Booting", that's programmers' jargon for all the operations done automatically when you start-up your system.)

Any computer with operating system  Windows 95 ,  Windows 98  or  Windows NT  has an AUTOSTART directory. (In other operating systems there are similar directories.) In  Windows 95  and  Windows 98  systems it is quite easy to find: In your Windows-directory (e.g.  C:\Windows ) there is a sub-directory  Start menu  with a sub-sub-directory  Programs . One of its sub-directories is in turn called  Autostart  (i.e.  C:\Windows\Start menu\Programs\Autostart ).

Under  Windows NT  it's a bit more complicated. The Windows-directory (e.g.  C:\Winnt ) has a sub-directory  Profiles  with three sub-sub-directories  Administrator ,  All Users  and  Default User . That's because  Windows NT  is a multi-seat system. It is frequently used for spanning a network between several people, each one with different access rights. Each of these three directories has its own sub-tree  Start menu\Programs\Autostart .

You can have any number of links in your  Autostart  directory. And you can modify every link such that it is called with the right command line. To that end, do the following:

* Click the link you want to modify by the right mouse key. A 'context menu' pops up now. (Be sure not to move the mouse during right-clicking, or a different menu is coming up now.)
* Click  Properties  in that context menu (both, left or right mouse key). A tabbed dialog  Properties of ...  pops up now. (... is the name of the link to be modified.)
* Click tab  Link . Locate input field  Target:  in the dialog coming up now. In field  Target , at the end of the entry that was created automatically, separated by one or more spaces, type the command line you want to assign to that operation. (If you have multi-word parameters, don't forget to bracket them in pairs of single or double quotation marks.)
* Finally, click button  OK  or press the  ENTER-key.

An easy shortcut you can take by typing in the command line right when you create the shell.

If you have operations requiring more code than just one command line, a batch-file might be useful. I used a batch file as part of my multilevel backup. For details see http://www.itspecial.org/article9.htm and article10.htm

'Almost' I said in the introduction because there are a few operations you can do not by a command line but only by hand. For example, if you want to export a file from or import a file into your registry, you can do that only by clicking the corresponding menu item within the registry editor ( RegEdit.exe ).

To give you an idea of what might be useful in AUTOSTART, let me tell you what I have in mine.

One thing that will be useful for any professional computer user is to have the Windows explorer always available. So I have a shell link to  Explorer.exe  in my AUTOSTART. Once Explorer is started, I have it minimized in the taskbar, right at hand while I'm working in any other application. Thus I can shuffle files created by myself or downloaded from Internet. By right-clicking on a file in Explorer I can even apply other applications to it.

Very useful is a link to a general launch pad I wrote recently to have many different applications right at my fingertips, simply by pressing a single key.