Jan 14, 2012 12:53am Kyle Staskiewicz ♦
 » Webmaster Lv 128 / 27 Blogs

Internet Download Manager: The Startup Nightmare

I've long been a fan of Internet Download Manager n and its ability to not only grab videos from sites such as YouTube, but also its ability to open multiple connections at once, effectively doubling, tripling, and sometimes quadrupling my download speed of certain items. However, recently I've become irritated with the update manager that likes to start up when your computer turns on and ended up disabling it completely for stability reasons.

The problem first arose on my laptop. I just assumed that my laptop was getting older and it was natural that it would slow down a little. It wasn't a huge irritant at first, only causing a few seconds of delay time when the computer starts up. However, as the problem was left unchecked over time, the delay time became much worse. It was beginning to take a minute for my laptop to organize itself after logging in. Nothing would even work. I couldn't open the start menu, programs, or anything for that matter until whatever IDM was doing finished. Eventually, it started affecting other startup items, including my Wi-Fi connection, and started taking up to 10 minutes to finish doing whatever it was doing each time I started up my laptop computer. Again, I just dismissed it as "being my laptop" and didn't think anything of it. At the time, I had no idea that it was actually IDM causing the issues, and I ended up living with it for a couple months since I don't use my laptop all that often.

When the problem started to arise on my desktop computer as well, I got curious. My recent purchase of a Bluetooth mouse from Logitech required a new piece of software to connect at startup. I was frequently annoyed with messages to reconnect my mouse when I started my computer whenever IDM attempted to download or install an update on my computer. It seems that the permissions verification screen that pops up freezes other applications temporarily and causes the software to think my mouse isn't connected. This was extremely irritating because it takes a good minute or two of time to successfully reconnect your mouse to the Bluetooth adapter, effectively making my startup time 2 minutes before I could use my computer. It got so bad at one point that my entire computer locked up completely because IDM would not let any other processes on the system do anything whatsoever as it was downloading and attempting to install things.

Now 99% sure that IDM was causing the problem, I simply removed the IDM processes from the startup items in my configuration, on both my laptop and desktop computer. This immediately solved the issue and drastically increased my startup speed. I had almost forgotten how fast my computers could start. Ever since I forbid Internet Download Manager from loading on startup, I haven't had this problem, ever. So, if you're having any problems with your computer at startup and have IDM installed, try disabling its startup routines and see if it fixes the issue for you.