The dock dosent appear untill 5-7 seconds after pc start up and the desktop is shown.
i have a 7700K and running on a SSD, i can open up chrome beore the dock is ready

Yeah, and you should write an email to Microsoft about that instead of us, because THEY are the ones 100% to blame for it. Unfortunately you can also be 100% sure that they, unlike Winstep, won't care a bit about whatever you have to say about the subject.

You see, the delay you are experiencing is 100% deliberate. Under Windows 10, Microsoft delays the startup of 3rd party applications by several seconds *on purpose* so Windows itself can appear to boot faster.

Fortunately Winstep does provide a way to bypass this delay, and the solution has been staring at you in the face this whole time.

See that gray power button that is in the dock by default when you run the Winstep application for the first time? It's not a decorative ornament.

You should actually *read* what it says when you mouse over it - and then click on it so it turns green.

I kind of find it amusing when someone posts a question here but then never return to read the actual answer.

Anyway, time replying here is never lost as the answer remains available for others to read.

Indeed, on both counts.

Mind you, sometimes somebody might not come back within a few days to see if there's an answer. Seen it on occasion. Done it on occasion myself, at any rate elsewhere.

OTOH, it's quite gratifying when occasionally somebody comes back with a 'thank you'. Good manners cost nothing.

Actually this - Windows 10 deliberately delaying the startup of 3rd party applications - is a subject that is particularly frustrating to me.

I came up with a way to bypass the issue with the 'Fast Boot' option, but only by using a mechanism that was never intended for that purpose. I try to play fair and I don't enable Fast Boot by default on purpose because if every application did what Fast Boot does we would soon be back to square one and the Wild West.

I therefore leave the option deliberately disabled by default so that it's up to the user to enable it (or not). Unlike Microsoft, I firmly believe that the user is the King of his system.

Now, I could understand that user's didn't even notice the option when it was 'buried' (ahem) in the General tab of Preferences, but precisely because of that I also made a new 'Fast Boot' internal command whose ONLY purpose is to enable that setting, and I placed an icon to it on the default dock. If you mouse over it, it even explains exactly what it does and WHY it does it.

Still user's don't notice it's there. AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH. lol

LOL! Well Jorge, it's the same old thing, as in the old adage, 'you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink!'

But yeah, the whole issue is frustrating from start to finish. Since Bill found better things to do, MS seem to firmly subscribe to the idea that the user doesn't matter and should be disempowered and everything should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, esp. so with Win 10.

And even with preventing third party apps loading at startup Win 10 still takes an age to boot (and to settle down), longer with each update it seems - not to even mention restarts!

Wowww talk about a shitty attitude toward your users.
no i hadn't come around to seeing the answer before now yah i had completely forgotten about it. but had i know to expect this i hadn't bothered asking in the first place.

Sorry, I don't think we're on the same wave. You asked, I gave you the answer.

What was shitty about any of the things I wrote?

Me complaining 4 days later that you had apparently wasted my time by asking a question and then not even bothering to check back, or because you didn't like me pointing out that the answer was right under your nose?

Or per chance does our friend mean, the shitty attitude of MS etc.? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt....

I know I have a very tongue-in-cheek, non deferential attitude, and some users - very, very, few actually, thank God - don't like that very much, confusing it with something else.

If they manage to keep their sense of humor and remain engaged in the conversation, they quickly realize how wrong they were and that they are actually talking directly to the developer, with all the perks that implies.

Some become arrogant, however, and that is not something I tolerate (this is one of the perks I have of of owning the company instead of being an employee), although I am always wiling to forgive and start over if they lose the attitude (and some actually do and we then proceed to have a wonderful conversation, fueled by the mutual new found respect).

In the 20 years I have been in business there was even one guy who threatened to get me fired (lots of chuckling ensued, of course). That was the result of that particular person not understanding the real meaning of 'the customer is always right' and trying to take advantage of that to get something he wasn't entitled to. The customer is right ONLY if he actually is; what that phrase really means is that customer satisfaction should be a priority - not that you have to bend over and...

Plus, this 'Fast Boot' thing is something that really frustrates me (and that comes across quite clearly) and I explain why above - but it is not personal to this user, it's a general thing, just like you can pretty much count on users never reading a dialog box at the beginning of an application and just blindly clicking Ok. It's human condition.

In the end, my frustration ends up being with myself, because I don't know what else to do to make that option 'jump' to the user's eyes.

Reminds me of that hilarious AskTog (Apple's ex-lead designer) article about 'Maximizing Windows: The Most Difficult Design Problem I ever encountered' on how trying to get users to do such a simple thing as maximizing a window almost turned out to be more than they (the designers) could chew.

Yeah, I know what you mean Jorge. And actually, it's one of your endearing qualities IMO.

In my own field/s I always found that 99% of the time the customer was never right, but often - if you wanted to keep the work and stay in business - you couldn't say so and just had to, as patronisingly and sarcy as possible of course (evil grin), humour them.

LOL! Well, you could always fire yourself Jorge.

Never really understood that mentality myself. Amiga users certainly generally were very different in this (and many another) respect, and I don't think it happened much in the NeXT world either.

Use a delay before the user can click it away perhaps, say 30secs the first time it's run?

Yep, that's true. Of course, some platforms never had an option to max windows - e.g., NeXT/OPENSTEP, and Amiga (where however you could run most apps on their own (physical) screen which had the same effect generally). (Those having been my first serious platforms might have something to do with my still not liking to use max'ed windows and only very rarely doing so, preferring to resize instead. All the more so with this idiotic wide screen format - only thing that's any good for in computing terms is wallpapers. )