Last Updated on February 25, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake
If you use Windows a lot, you might want to have programs starting up in the background but minimized to the taskbar, so you don’t have to use them. Doing so means you won’t have to go to the trouble of opening them later, while at the same time they won’t be stopping you from doing other tasks in the meantime.
To date, there has not been an application that can allow for you to start programs minimized to the taskbar automatically, but there have been options to make it happen from within the settings of some applications. In other words, some apps have programmed this option for you to select from their individual settings, but that will always rely on you having one of the compatible applications and still leaves you high and dry for other apps.
A reader has discovered a workaround that Windows users can try using a shortcut. To do it, you need to create a shortcut for your application, as you would any other shortcut, and then copy and paste the shortcut to the following location on your hard drive:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
All that’s left to do is open the shortcut’s properties dialog and then check the option for starting it up “minimized.”