Start manager minimized

[davidpanderson]

A user asked me if there's an option to start the Manager minimized on Win, on system startup. As far as I know there's not (other than to create a shortcut with the /s flag).

There should at least be an option for this; maybe it should be the default. BOINC should be as unobtrusive as possible.

One way to do this would be to have the manager remember its minimized state; if it was minimized at shutdown it should be minimized on startup.

[AenBleidd]

Here's the question: Minimized to taskbar (visible) or Minimized to Tray (non-visible)? Because current behavior is when starting BOINC Manager on system start-up it starts Minimized to tray. And actually another more important question: does user really want Manager to be minimized (even to taskbar) on start? As for me it's confusing when you start some application and it hides on taskbar and sometimes you could really not find it fast, you just could keep thinking that it is still launching

[RichardHaselgrove]

I echo @AenBleidd: that's the way it works for me now. On default installation, default behaviour (with registry command "D:\BOINC\boincmgr.exe" /a /s) is to minimise to tray. Anything else is user action.

But unfortunately, with recent versions of Windows, that means minimised and hidden:

That's Windows 7, and it's easy to 'customize' it to

The same change can be made in Windows 10, but you probably need to search Google for a HowTo. If only we could do that on installation...

[AenBleidd]

If only we could do that on installation...

I'm not sure this should be done by installer. If I understand correctly, it's up to user to decide what icons (s)he wants to see on system tray. Personally I prefer to see everything and have this particular option 'On' in settings:

[RichardHaselgrove]

Unfortunately this issue was opened too late last night for me to boot into my Windows 10 test partition, but I've done that now.

We don't have a description of what the user is trying to achieve in their own words - it would have been helpful to progress this issue through https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/BOINC_Help, as suggested in #2941, so that the necessary questions could have been asked and answered before assuming that changes were needed.

So, trying to cover all bases (as we would on a message board): There are three ways of starting BOINC in Windows.

• Automatically as a service at startup, with no Manager
• Automatically in user mode, with Manager minimised to notification area
• Manually in user mode, from a Manager shortcut (automatically generated in the start menu)

The default manual launch opens the Manager in a "Normal" window, neither maximised nor minimised. The BOINC Manager itself memorises placement, size, state, with or without Event Log, and so on. There are two things it (deliberately) won't do:

1. Memorise placement on a secondary monitor
2. Start minimised in manual mode.

But if the user really wants to start the Manager manually without using it for anything (which seems odd), that can be achieved:

Delve through the Start menu to find the location of the shortcut file:

Open the 'Properties' of the shortcut, and add the /s parameter to the command line.

That all works in Windows 10, though harder to find than it used to be.

@AenBleidd has covered notification area icon management, but one further method is described in https://winaero.com/blog/always-show-tray-icons-windows-10/:

Open the 'Run Program' dialog, and type - better, paste -

shell:::{05d7b0f4-2121-4eff-bf6b-ed3f69b894d9}

That opens the 'classic' (Windows 7) visibility picker I showed last night. BOINC Manager has to be running for its icon to be displayed by any of these tools.

[AenBleidd]

I believe these comments answer the user's question. Should this ticket be closed?

[davidpanderson]

I suggest that we make sure all the information here is in the online documentation (e.g. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/BOINC_Manager), then close this issue.

[AenBleidd]

@davidpanderson, could you please add necessary info to the online documentation and close this issue?