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Hi Joe, First of all, I would use Task Scheduler to configure your executable to run once at startup, with "highest priority". You can also experiment with the setting "run whether user is logged on or not" and with running it in the account "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM": I think that this will allow your task to run before Windows logs you in as a user. You will also want to get rid of most unnecessary tasks in Task Scheduler, disable unnecessary services (including NI services), and minimize the number of logs that Windows creates. Also you'll want to check the configuration of your BIOS/UEFI: minimize startup delays, power-on self-tests, disable unused hardware (e.g. unused COM ports). You mentioned LV runtime engine and VISA. I don't know what hardware you control through VISA, but if it's an RS232 instrument and if you can use a USB/COM adapter, and if your adapter could be built using an FTDI chip, then you don't need VISA: you can use in FTDI driver. I can share a LV wrapper for this driver. No guarantee that this approach is faster than VISA, but it could be worth trying. One more idea: if your application is really light, you may want to consider an older version of LV, maybe as old as LV6 or LV7.11: they can work without runtime engines installed, all you'll need is a few DLLs. Fewer things to load from the drive and fewer services to worry about after your application exits. Finally, you used the word "embedded". I don't know if you just mean a physically embedded PC running regular commercial Windows or a truly customized version of Windows, like Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. If it's the latter, there are lots of things that you can customize in it, including throwing out most things that you don't need, enabling keyboard filter (e.g. to block Ctrl-Alt-Del), universal write filter (UWF) to block writes to the hard drive (this can also speed up the process, since your disk writes will actually go to a dedicated part of RAM). To learn more about using Windows 10 LTSC for building a "kiosk"-type application, check out https://solidusintegration.com/sikiosk.html. Best, Sergey