Many rely on the friendly behavior of BOINC to just consume the idle CPU cycles the user is not taking with it's own activities, but during System Boot-Up it can play out slightly different. When BOINC starts it often needs to fetch large models from hard-disk for tasks it had been working on prior to System Shut-Down. This CAN result in holding up the initial full system access.

During booting when you have a Service aka "protected" client installation, BOINC will load the sometimes large science models into memory and start computing when the system is not yet fully available, even when you want it to be As Soon As Possible. Same goes for the User aka "Unprotected" installation. After logging into the system many processes are trying to start, BOINC will try so too.

In order to improve this, version 6 of BOINC has a new <option> available for insert into the cc_config.xml file **. It has the format <start_delay>xx</start_delay> where xx is the number of seconds computation is Not started after loading of the BOINC (core) client.

** See for a configuration and editing "How To" instruction the Official Wiki)

This option is only available in BOINC version 6 and up, but users that have the Vista operating system with Client Service install can achieve this delay too with previous versions (See Vista FAQ, item 17).

• Sign into the system as a user that has administrative rights.
  
• Launch the services.msc applet from the Start bar Run/Execute box.
  
• Find the BOINC entry in the list, right click this one and select properties from the pop up menu.
  
• Then where you see Automatic open the drop down box and pick "Automatic (Start with Delay)".
  
• Hit the Apply button to confirm the change

Next time the system boots, the science loading and computing will not commence until well after signing in (assuming most will do as soon as the log-in screen becomes available).

No one left to suspect BOINC of causing a slow start up of your computer!

NB:

If there is a function in Linux or Mac to delay the start of an application similar to what Vista can do for BOINC 5, please post in the BOINC Support forum and we'll integrate this into this FAQ.