Auto Starting Apps in Windows 10

I’ve recently installed a Ring Video Doorbell and am awaiting delivery of  a Stick-up Cam, after which I’ll start writing a review. However one minor concern is that although notifications come through fairly quickly (depending on the current internet connection) it still takes a moment for the app to start. This is literally only a second or two, but with the couple of seconds delay for the notification to arrive anything to trim down the time taken to respond to an event is worth investigating.

With this in mind I started wondering how to actually automatically launch a UWP App when Windows 10 starts up. Running msconfig and selecting the startup tab now redirects you to the task manager. The task manager section only provides the ability to enable and disable from the current list. Curious…

A few minutes with Bing and I found a good article over at WindowsReport.com that covers how to do this.

Essentially I called up a Run command ( Windows Key + R) and entered the command:

shell:Startup

This opened a file explorer window to the startup folder location.

The next question was how do I actually create a shortcut to a UWP App in this folder?

Simple. I made sure the file explorer window would be visible with my start menu opened. Opened up the start menu, then simple dragged the tile for the UWP app onto the file explorer window and into that folder.

Job done.

I hope this quick tip saves somebody a bit of time searching around.

Advertisement

David Cutler

A brief interview with a genius.

Read more at http://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industry-luminaries-salute-dave-cutlers-five-decade-long-quest-for-quality/#sm.00001mwq8ils3ad4ny3qdf0w01ba7

4 Weeks in, 75 million installs

Windows 10 is now 4 weeks old, and Yusef Mehdi (Microsoft Corporate Vice President for the Windows and Devices Group) has revealed it has been installed 75 million times on over 90,000 unique PC/Tablet configurations (I wonder how many configurations Apple needs to support).

That’s a pretty strong start, and with many users who reserved still not being updated the figure looks set to continue rising rapidly for a little while yet.

I wonder how many new devices have been sold with Windows 10 pre-installed. I’ve had a look and don’t recall seeing any in the retail spaces I’ve visited, but to be honest I wasn’t really looking for the OS versions. Once these devices start appearing we may see further uptake, but this will be far below the number of people taking advantage of the free upgrade I would imagine.

It will be interesting to see what the numbers are in 4 weeks time.

Possibly just as interesting, it seems six times as many apps are being downloaded from the Windows Store per PC than under Windows 8.1 usage*. That bodes well for getting further apps to be ported and written for the platform. If many of these are UWP applications then perhaps the app gap on Windows Mobile may finally shrink a little.

Hey, a guy can dream!

* of course, many people didn’t use the store in Windows 8, so this could be a bit misleading. Either way, it’s still encouraging.