startup fences very slow (double windows startup time)...and other questions/remarks about the purchase

from Stardock Forums

Dear support (and others),

This post is intended in part for reporting an issue but also for those considering buying the product (fences or object desktop).

I already bought groupy before on steam and decided since i liked it, i make "the jump" and buy fences also. Since i got a nice discount for the whole object desktop package, i went with that, although honestly none of the other apps really interested me. Still i don't mind supporting a good software product and i might be positively surprised. 

Fences itself was much better then i anticipated. Imho the amount of effort in customizing and good design went well above my expectation. In some sense i think the website undersold it. 

Just like somebody else in the forum i got confused by the 365 days( 365 support, not 365 days license). Hence i bought groupy prior on steam, before i bought object desktop straight from this site. (So now i got 2 licences for that probably)

The other programs from object desktop (i tested 5 so far) i uninstalled after some tinkering. I don't anticipate ever using any of them (apart from groupy and fences).

So far so good. However 1 mayor thing and 1 minor thing did disappoint me (so far).

First the minor. Some of the animated Desktop backgrounds in deskscapes are really nice. I tried the animated ones and although the cpu-usage isn't that high, it does increase it enough to make my cpu (or gpu fan?) fan blow harder. They are not overly heavy but more then i expected, taking into consideration i got a decent cpu (see below).

The second thing which did surprise me in a bad way, is the startup delay after installing fences. To have some quantification i actually timed it, since "long" and "slow" are to subjective to make a forum post about.

Time between bios post and win login screen is a bit less then 10 sec. After entering my login, it takes fences 20 sec to show any icons on my desktop. Until then the screen remains empty. I did some checks (i.e. taskmanager->startup) to see if anything else is causing troubles but i am pretty sure its fences itself. Its seems a bit much fences taking more then 2x the time to start compared to the whole OS. Before fences the OS has been snappy for a long time also. Prior to fences, after login i could pretty much instantly use windows.

Although 20 sec for a one time boot is not the biggest issue, sometimes when multiple boots are required in a row, its particularly annoying if the boot hangs every time. Also, in my experience, programs that show this behavior, are prone to have other issues also and usually i regard unnecessary slowness as a lack of quality (but i hope this is not true in this case, particularly since i payed good money for it).

Specs:

- win10pro x64 completely upgraded etc 

- cpu: i7-8700k

- samsung 850 evo 500GB

- samsung nvme 970evo plus 1TB

- RAM 32GB 

- GPU: 1060GTX

Regards

 

fences
11,137 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are having trouble.

As Fences runs in the Windows Explorer process, some delay is expected.  Future versions will see what can be done to reduce it.

You are going to want to ensure that you have two entries at startup for Fences as one being absent could add to any Fences \ Desktop not showing as soon as it should:

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting sdRohan, reply 1

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are having trouble.

As Fences runs in the Windows Explorer process, some delay is expected.  Future versions will see what can be done to reduce it.

You are going to want to ensure that you have two entries at startup for Fences as one being absent could add to any Fences \ Desktop not showing as soon as it should:



Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager
End of sdRohan's quote

 

Thx for the fast response. I actually disabled one since i thought this was in error and 2 running at the same time usually is not what you want. I almost feel you have been watching my desktop now ;).

Anyway i enabled it again and re-timed. I was hopeful it would help, but its still 20 sec between win10-login => fences, so no change as far as i can see. 

(Aside from the slowness, the second reason why i thought 2 entries was erroneous is because i saw an other entry, to tiles64.exe after i uninstalled tiles, so i assumed this was done a bit sloppy maybe)

 

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

I looked also at the other forum thread here . There some suggest its "normal" and more related to windows then to fences. Is it possible to give some insight in the nature of the delay? Is fences just hooking unto an event that is triggered very late by windows? Is fences maybe checking the activation with a very slow server straight away or some other DRM things? Are other programs hogging up the bootup process (or parts of windows itself)? Would the steam version be quicker or even slower (might be the case if its related to the drm)?

20 secs seems like a lot of time just to group the icons into a couple of groups. Something like "classic shell" doenst take as much time (it seems nistant) and in some ways it seems comparable to fences (at least to me, it hooks into explorer etc). 

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting Neil, reply 4

Windows intentionally delays the startup of things in the startup group in order to make the startup process appear quicker.

This is why Fences is slow to start.

This can be disabled in the OS via this method : https://www.howtogeek.com/403162/how-to-disable-the-windows-10-startup-delay/
End of Neil's quote

Well that makes a lot of sense ! Its very nice to know about this option. However i am not gonna tinker with that if that means all programs in the "startup" will start immediately. If a program in the startup depends on services being loaded, those programs might fail in unexpected ways, now or later down the road when i install something and completely forgot about changing the startup-delay. 

I would think its best to start fences just before the 'StartupDelayInMSec' so it has a head start in front of the other programs. Arguably this is desirable since you want the users to be able to use the system as quick as possible. 

I hope a techy of startdock can tell me/us if anything inside fences can tell us if this is "safe" to do. Does fences depend on something which is loaded during this startup delay?

If i got some time i might try this myself if i can find a hook just before the StartupDelayInMSec and can start fences (and only fences) then. 

edit: apparently this is a know "issue" with other programs also, mentioned on many places. 

As a possible solution i tried to create a new task with win10 "Task Scheduler" to startup notepad when i logon and notepad starts immediately (without the 10 sec delay). A solution to the delay might be to create a "basic task" (this can be done using the windows task scheduler, no registry hacking) for fences and disable the startup. When i got some tinkering time i might give this a try. Thx for the info Neil!

edit2: my idea is obviously for other users, not as a solution to implement by startdock. I still hope a more permanent solution can be found, maybe a settings somewhere for a "priority startup"

edit3: it would be nice if somebody could explain why there are two entries in "startup" (as mentioned above) and if its important to use both

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting reclame, reply 5


Quoting Neil Banfield,
reply 4

Windows intentionally delays the startup of things in the startup group in order to make the startup process appear quicker.

This is why Fences is slow to start.

This can be disabled in the OS via this method : https://www.howtogeek.com/403162/how-to-disable-the-windows-10-startup-delay/



Well that makes a lot of sense ! Its very nice to know about this option. However i am not gonna tinker with that if that means all programs in the "startup" will start immediately. If a program in the startup depends on services being loaded, those programs might fail in unexpected ways, now or later down the road when i install something and completely forgot about changing the startup-delay. 

I would think its best to start fences just before the 'StartupDelayInMSec' so it has a head start in front of the other programs. Arguably this is desirable since you want the users to be able to use the system as quick as possible. 

I hope a techy of startdock can tell me/us if anything inside fences can tell us if this is "safe" to do. Does fences depend on something which is loaded during this startup delay?

If i got some time i might try this myself if i can find a hook just before the StartupDelayInMSec and can start fences (and only fences) then. 

edit: apparently this is a know "issue" with other programs also, mentioned on many places. 

As a possible solution i tried to create a new task with win10 "Task Scheduler" to startup notepad when i logon and notepad starts immediately (without the 10 sec delay). A solution to the delay might be to create a "basic task" (this can be done using the windows task scheduler, no registry hacking) for fences and disable the startup. When i got some tinkering time i might give this a try. Thx for the info Neil!

edit2: my idea is obviously for other users, not as a solution to implement by startdock. I still hope a more permanent solution can be found, maybe a settings somewhere for a "priority startup"

edit3: it would be nice if somebody could explain why there are two entries in "startup" (as mentioned above) and if its important to use both

End of reclame's quote

I do not believe Fences requires anything to be started prior to itself as whilst it is used to load into Explorer it will simply wait until it finds it thus no harm if it were to start first.

As far as I am aware no apps should be adversely affected by changing that registry key as any app which relies on a 10 second pause before starting is liable to break on slower machines.  The delay was a new thing added in later OSes purely to stop disk thrashing and thus poor responsiveness on initial startup.

Most of the Stardock apps use services so they startup with the system and there is no delay in them running at startup rather than relying on the startup groups or even a scheduled task (which will not be as fast)