You may audit your startup list and realize that yes, you do want all these programs to start. But maybe you don’t need them to start up at the exact moment you’re dying to get into Outlook and read your email, or work on that urgent report. The Startup Delayer utility (our review) does just that-it delays items from starting up from anywhere from 20 seconds to several minutes to hours so you can start working sooner.

For instance, if your printer driver pre-loads but you’re not printing the moment you log on, you can delay it for a minute or two. Similarly, I really don’t need the Java Updater process starting its work before I do, so it is a good candidate for delaying.