How to run an Application on windows start up

 

 

There have different applications and Services in our PCs run automatically on system startup. How shall we add our application to this list?

 

 

Actually windows knows what to run at startup by keeping a list of applications name and paths under the following registry path, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. We can either manually add application name and path to that registry location or can do the same by following Windows APIs  RegOpenKeyEx and RegSetValue.

 

 

void RunApplicationOnStartup(CString strApplicationPath, CString strKeyName)
{
   HKEY hKey;
   CString sKeyName;
   unsigned char szFilePath[100];  
   /** Open Run Registry location */
   LONG lnRes = RegOpenKeyEx( HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,  
                  "SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run",
                  0L,KEY_WRITE,
                  &hKey ); 
      lstrcpy((char *) szFilePath , LPCTSTR(strApplicationPath));
      if (ERROR_SUCCESS == lnRes)
      {
      /** Set full application path with a keyname to registry */
      lnRes = RegSetValueEx(hKey,
                  LPCTSTR( sKeyName ),
                  0,      
                  REG_SZ,    
                  szFilePath,
                  REG_SZ ); 
      if( ERROR_SUCCESS == lnRes )
         AfxMessageBox(_T("Set at startup has done successfully"));
      else
         AfxMessageBox(_T("Failed to set at startup");
   }
   else
   {
      AfxMessageBox(_T("Failed to set at startup"));
   }
}

 

 

If you create it under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, it will apply to all users of the machine. If you create it under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, then the program will run automatically upon startup only for that user.