Colin Davis skrev: > I absolutely appreciate the spirit of the suggestion- Making things more > clear to the user is usually a good idea, but this suggestion doesn't > help users as much as it seems to. > > While I agree that it does make things a bit clearer, it only does so to > a certain sub-section of users- > Those users who know to look for things that start up in that > folder, but *don't* know to look in services. > > I'm not sure that this class of users is very large. I suspect that most > users would either not know where to look, and thus use the "Remove > Freenet from Startup" shortcut that's been discussed, or they'd look at > services First, and then after not-finding it, check the startup folder > in the Start menu. >
I'd argue that if the user knows about any autorun location at all, the start menu will be the one. Most Windows users probably don't even know what the service MMC snap-in is (:s), where the functionality of "Start -> All programs -> Start" seems a bit more easy to "comprehend". Users will probably be more or less used to Adobe Reader and OpenOffice installing quicklaunch stuff there as well. > Further- Freenet is the type of application I install on multiple > servers. These machines don't necessarily EVER get logged into, and I > suspect this is somewhat common behavior. Since Freenet does slow the > machine down, running on an auxiliary machine is a nice feature, but the > start-menu version damages this behavior. > You are probably right for some server-only Windows installations (not sure how many log in and how many don't). It is possible to run applications at the login screen via the registry (The cisco VPN client does, for example), but I haven't looked into it. Nothing should prevent server admins from adding Freenet as a service. We could even provide a script for it (basically copy&paste the .cmd the Java installer executes to install the service atm.). I think the main question is more if *most* users would benefit from the start menu autorun or service autorun (and if we should ask about autorun method in the installer perhaps?). > Further, on multi-user machine, an installed service runs during all of > the user's sessions. This means much greater uptime for the node, which > means better performance for each of the users on it. > True. One disadvantage of using this method. > Finally, Freenet *does* take a bit of time to startup.. It's a lot more > user-friendly to have this time as early as possible. > When the machine is booting, I don't care if it takes an extra few > seconds to start up; I'm not using it yet. > But once the GUI appears, I expect things to be snappy, I don't want to > then wait while Freenet starts. Starting it earlier in the chain is a > net-win. > Many things first start when the user has logged in (since many autoruns are user-specific too!), but it would indeed be preferred to autorun as early as possible. - Zero3
