Make sure your PC is ready when you arrive in the office
You know you try to make your personal PC as efficient as it can be. In the office it is a different story especially when you have bunch of mandatory compliance stuff to load on startup. That’s when regulatory compliance becomes a real pain. Well if it takes 20 minutes to load everything and you cannot do anything then you should try to use from technologies that are available around you.
1. My computer’s BIOS supports autostartup, so I have it set to come on at 7:20AM every day (I arrive at the office at 8AM).
2. I use TweakUI to autologin to the computer, use kb315231 otherwise. This gets it starting and lets all the startup programs take however long they need to get going.
3. REMAIN COMPLIANT. I have a shortcut in my startup menu with a target of: %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation, which locks the workstation. This way, if anyone tries to power up my computer when I’m not there, they can’t do anything, remember you are an admin.
4. I have a batch program in my startup menu with this command shutdown -s -t 7200 -c “If I’m not here, this computer will shut itself down.” -f, which will shut the PC down in 2 hours. That way, if I’m out sick, the PC isn’t on all day. Of course, if I’m late, I have ’till 9:20 or so to make it to my desk and abort the destruct sequence with #5…
5. I have a subfolder of Startup called Abort Shutdown, with a batch file in it with the command shutdown -a, which will (duh) abort the shutdown when I click it. The folder is open when I arrive, and the batch file is sitting there, waiting to be clicked on.
So, in the 40 minutes before I arrive, everything gets rolling. While 40 minutes might seem excessive, they are other things you may want to have your computer do while waiting for you such as backup or other sync.
This also works well in the middle of the day when a restart is required. I can fire and forget — go get a double-double or something, and I don’t have to come back just to log in and wait some more. By the time I’m back, it’s ready to rock and roll.
