I was annoyed – but not anymore. I have been developing for Apache/MySQL on my laptop for a while, and in the beginning I would start the Apache and MySQL services automatically as I booted Windows. Recently I embarked to minimize the boot time of my Windows installation – and that included minimizing the services starting automatically – including Apache and MySQL. To start these two services, I enabled the System Tray icons for the two services and when I wanted to start the services I would right click the MySQL monitor and choose “Start instance”, and then left-click the Apache icon and click “Start” in the submenu.
This seems fairly simple, but if you try to navigate icons in the System Tray before everything is done loading, you will know that right-clicking something may give long delays, sometimes sub-menues disapear and you don’t know if it was because of your click, which it did not respond to or if your click was actually registered. So the tip is simple and low tech – perform the same thing in a .bat file:
startamp.bat:
net start mysql
net start apache2
stopamp.bat:
net stop apache2
net stop mysql
Put these on your desktop or quickstart menu..