Topic: Start in StartWatch

[George Richardson]

Now that StartWatch is ready to go Gold, I'm ready to jump on board. There has been much discussion of the Watch portion of the program. I am curious about the how and why of the Start portion. Would youall (I'm from the South) comment on your Start settings?

TIA

George

[W3DRM]

George,

Perhaps it would be helpful if you would give us a description of your setup, including system type, cpu speed, operating system (Win version), WX station type, software you want to monitor, etc, etc. Giving you our setups is just shooting in the dark and most likely won't be of much use to you.

No matter what your layout, you will still have to tweak the settings to fit your particular situation so don't wait until you hear from other users. I'd suggest that you jump in and play with the products. That's the only way you are going to really get a feel for them. All of Steve's products have a trial period that will allow you to play around and see if you like them or not.

[tinplate]

Without know the programs you'd be starting with StartWatch, it's hard to say. The original motivation for the startup features of StartWatch was to coordinate the startup of weather programs connecting to VirtualVP. If you are running VirtualVP, I would define a port monitor in StartWatch that monitors an unused VirtualVP virtual TCP/IP port. Set VirtualVP to start when StartWatch starts, and set the weather programs that connect to VirtualVP to start after the monitored VirtualVP port becomess responsive. That way you guarantee that the weather programs start after VirtualVP is all done initializing and is ready to serve out data.

Other general tips that could be used with any programs you're starting with StartWatch:

1) If you stagger the startup of programs using different delay values, things can start up quicker since the system doesn't have a blast of a whole bunch of programs all starting and initializing at the same time. Start the most important ones first and have the least important start last.

2) If you have a program that is only useful if there is a good connection to the internet, you could setup  a port monitor to something on the internet that should always be up such as a popular web server, or the DNS server you use. If it's not a server you own, be nice and don't set a frequent check interval. Use one of the less frequent check intervals. Then, have the program that needs the internet only start when the internet port monitor is up. No sense starting that program only to have it fail right after it starts.

3) If you have interdependent programs, use StartWatch to have them start in the correct order. If program B depends on program A, start program A first, and then configure StartWatch to start B after program A has started.

Steve

[Anole]

1) If you stagger the startup of programs using different delay values, things can start up quicker since the system doesn't have a blast of a whole bunch of programs all starting and initializing at the same time. Start the most important ones first and have the least important start last.

This is one area where I was really very pleasantly surprised at the impact of StartWatch. Staggerring the startups of 5 programs (VirtualVP, WD, VPlive, WeatherLink, and VWS) chopped at least a minute off my startup time. Things are starting much cleaner as well.

[Ravenstar]

I agree Anole, staggering startups is great. I stager each one one minute after the previous. And George you won't regret jumping on board with SW, the benefits are awesome.

I even use it to startup a non weather related process last, that I've had problems with in the past when everything was crammed into the Startup folder. For one reason or another this app would crash windows I had to remove it from startup and start it manually after everything else had started up. I haven't had a crash since using SW.

And having the first weather program startup after VirtualVP establishes a connection to the console is another plus. Then all the rest are dependent on the previous. Therefore none of the weather programs will start unless that initial connection to the console is established.

[George Richardson]

Don et al,

I usually try to supply necessary info but this time I was short. When the boss lady said jump, I hit post rather than cancel on the way up while asking How High? I don't multitask well.

My weather station is a Davis Vantage pro2 wireless.

The dedicated weather computer has an AMD 3300+ 2.19 GHz processor with 736 MB RAM and Win XP Home SP2 OS.

The Software I'm running is WL 5.7; VWS IE V12.08 p11; VPL 1.1.4.61; VVP 1.1.1.2; Dimension 4 (to correct computer time); and NAV2006.

I also run Startup Delayer V2.2 build 85 which starts VVP @ +1 min; VPL @ +1:15 and VWS @ +1:45.

I am providing information to WUG as KVAMONET1 and to CWOP as CW6097.

While any suggestions for setup would be appreciated, I really felt I could interpolate from others setups. However, Steves referral to port monitoring just puts me in Blondsville so I may be begging for some handholding shortly.

Thanks to all for your interest,

George

[Mark / Ohio]

George,
Here's my current setup on an old 466Mhz approx. 500MB RAM machine.  This setup seems to be working well for me after repeated testing from simple shut down and restart of the weather programs to a full system reboot.  The port monitoring is good also in that it shuts down the programs if there is a problem and no data to read.  The Tick program is used to disconnect my dialup connection after two minutes of inactivity.  It is more reliable than the built in Windows auto disconnect.  

[George Richardson]

Mark,

Thanks so much for the screen shot. Only question; What triggers StartWatch?

George

[Mark / Ohio]

In the settings, "Options" then "General" is check marked to start when windows starts.  Steve's also provided options in the menus to manually start or close programs while windows is running.

One thing I might change in mine is to make a longer delay after StartWatch starts until it starts Virtual VP.  When the computer boots you never know exactly when it will activate Startwatch and I think a longer delay there might be a little better to let my firewall and Antivirus programs get up and running.  But on a faster computer that may not be as much of a concern.  Another thing I will probably change now that I'm now that I'm pretty comfortable with my settings is to go into my computer's bios settings and enable the computer to restart itself after a power failure.  I like everything to be as hands off as possible.

[W3DRM]

Have installed vvp 1.1.4 this evening. So far, everything looks good.

Mark - How do you have your Port Monitor set up? I'm only using the delay portion of StartWatch to kick-off the next process (VVP, VPLive, VWS, Weather Display).

[Mark / Ohio]

...Mark - How do you have your Port Monitor set up? I'm only using the delay portion of StartWatch to kick-off the next process (VVP, VPLive, VWS, Weather Display).

Here's a screenshot, top is the StartWatch settings and the lower portion shows the Virtual VP Communication Settings configuration.  




Further to my last post..
I increased the interval between when StartWatch starts Virtual VP to 1 minute.  I think that's going to be better for me.  I reset my computer BIOS to auto restart on a power failure.  Then I gritted my teeth and killed the power to the PC to see if it all would work.  Applied power again, computer booted and run scan disk as expected, finished booting and restarted all the weather software without a single hitch.