How to launch app, open website and mute sounds on Windows Startup

Problem

There are several apps and actions we want to launch on Windows startup:

• Open Gmail as a web app.
• Assign a drive letter to my Windows user folder (yes, I'm oldschool guy who prefers drive letters instead of digging into folder trees)
• Mute sounds

Many applications provide a feature to open them when Windows starts, but above don't.

Solution

Hot Keyboard has an option to run a macro on Windows startup. We will create three macros, put them to a Hot Keyboard menu and set to execute this menu's items on Windows startup.

Requirements

• Hot Keyboard 6.5.117 or above
• "Start Hot Keyboard on Windows startup" option must be enabled. (default)

Step-by-step

1. Add a menu, let's name it "Windows Startup", and set two options:
   • Execute all child macros of this menu in series
   • Run macro by: Windows Startup, I set delay to 5 seconds to distribute initial load.
   
2. Add "Open web page" macro for Gmail:
   • Set Google Chrome as a browser (you can leave yours, but next option is availble for Chrome only)
   • Set "Open as desktop application" - so Gmail will run separately like a stand-alone app, and I don't have to switch between tabs to find it.
   
3. Add "Launch application" macro to assign a drive letter
   • There is a Windows command "subst" that assigns a drive letter to a folder, so we put subst u: "c:\users\tyurin\"
   
4. Add "Sound Volume control" macro to set sounds to zero level
   
5. 5. Restart.