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Saturday, February 16, 2013

[Guide] Launching iTunes minimized in Windows

I use the Home Sharing feature of iTunes to watch movies and TV shows I’ve added to the media library. Thus it is important for me to have iTunes running in the background all the time. You can add iTunes to your Windows startup, but it is better to have iTunes start minimized.

So how do you normally add an application to Windows startup and launch it minimized? You create a shortcut to the application you want and set the startup mode (or “Run” mode) to “Minimized”. Then you copy the shortcut to the Startup folder in your user profile and boom.

I have to agree that Microsoft is dumb when it comes to certain things. They have made it so hard to access this Startup folder in Windows 8. With previous OSes, you can simply access it from the Start Menu. But that’s not the case anymore. Your Startup folder is located here:

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

 2013-02-15_23-09-32

But we all know that iTunes sucks on Windows. It is darn slow and bloated, and in this case, it wouldn’t launch minimized by using the above trick. In fact, it doesn’t launch at all! You cannot even open it by double clicking the icon, until you kill the process from Task Manager.

But there is a trick. Using the following VB Script, you can open iTunes Minimized. Actually, it launches iTunes maximized or to whatever size it opens by default, and then minimize it momentarily. You just copy it to the Startup folder and boom.

MinimiTunes

Yes, it is not an elegant workaround (I mean, it opens and then minimizes, instead of starting minimized). But it works.

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