How can I delay the startup of WireReady to give Windows a chance to finish booting/loading all drivers - and to wait until the drive letter I use with WireReady has a chance to appear?
Q: I'm using a substituted drive letter or mapped drive that sometimes doesn't come up right away when windows is booting. I want WireReady to startup automatically if the machine reboots. How can I delay the startup of WireReady to give Windows a chance to finish booting/loading all drivers, and to wait until the drive letter I use with WireReady has a chance to appear?
A: WRDELAY.EXE is a simple program that can be used to launch ANY program (including WireReady programs like WR32, wincap, dbcapture, pcapture, ecapture, etc etc) and delay the startup of the program. This is handy when you want a program to start at boot time, but you want to ensure that windows is given enough time to finish booting or to substitute or login/map drives.
WRDELAY "PROGRAM TO BE STARTED" ##
Where: Program to be started is the path/filename of the program, along with any parameters. If parameters are used make sure you include this in quotes. ## is the delay time - anything from 5 and greater allowed.
For those not familiar with command line utilities, making batch files or putting things in Windows Startup group, here is additional information:
1. Make a batch file - wrstart.bat
A batch file is a text file made with a program like notepad - saved as shown. For file type, choose DOS text file. It has nothing to do with DOS, but this tells notepad to let you type the extension "*.bat." If you choose another format, it will add the letters TXT or DOC or RTF to wrstart.bat. If your file is wrstart.bat.txt - it won't work.
2. The contents of the file should be something like this:
SUBST W: C:\WIREREADY (or whatever your substitution requires)
WRDELAY "W:\WIRE\WR_WIN.EXE /u david" 30
3. The batch file can be saved anywhere but is usually saved in C:\ (the root of the drive).
4. Put the shortcut into the Startup group so it runs automatically when the computer it rebooted.
a. From My Computer or Windows Explorer, right-click on the bat and make a shortcut to it.
b. Copy paste/drag drop the shortcut into the STARTUP group of the start menu (right-click on the START button, click open, and go under Programs, click in Startup and paste it in).
5. Reboot the computer to test your work:
When the computer starts, the batch file executes and the first thing it does is the drive substitution. It will open a dos box briefly, (the whole point behind WRDELAY is that we want to give Windows a chance to finish booting and make sure it has had a chance to substitute the drive (the first line of the batch file)).
NOTE: Notice the format of WRDELAY. You put whatever command line you need to start WireReady. On a standalone, some just do "w:\wire\wr32.exe /u username," where wr32.exe is the EXE you run Wireready with. Basically whatever EXE you want to run, you put it there with the correct path. The /u username is usually /u onair, /u prod, etc., depending on which Wireready user profile you use on that machine. The last number is the number of seconds it counts down before executing the program.
Make sure to enclose the command line we're speaking of in quotes. Since WRDELAY looks for a space between the program to be started and the delay time. Since the parameters for starting our program have spaces too - that whole part MUST be enclosed in quotes to be treated as one parameter.
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