Batch File for Firing Up AX 2012

By Eric Newell | November 5, 2012

I use my laptop for many things - actually, scratch that, I use it for everything.  Because of this, I load everything possible onto my laptop - media editing software, Visual Studio, all the Office tools (including Project, Visio, SharePoint Designer and Workspace) and, of course, I loaded SQL so I could load Dynamics AX 2012.

I have a Sony VAIO Z Series laptop, which is easily the lightest and best laptop I've ever owned, and it's been perfoming great, but I was noticing it was starting to get warm and the hard drive light was on more than necessary.  When I looked at the Resource Monitor I noticed AX, SQL and SQL Reporting Services were taking up about 1 GB of my 8 GB of memory.  They weren't consuming much in the way of processor time, but I thought, if I don't need them running all the time (which I don't), why not shut them down and create a batch file to kick off AX when I need it.

I changed my services settings to set SQL, SQL Agent, SQL Reporting Services and AX to manual so they wouldn't have to boot up right away (this saved me a few seconds on boot-up too).  Now my laptop is cooler than before and the battery life is better, and if I need to launch AX, I'm only 40 seconds away from it starting, thanks to this batch file.

@echo off 
net start mssqlserver 
timeout 3 
net start sqlserveragent 
timeout 3 
net start reportserver 
timeout 3 
net start AOS60$01 
timeout 15 
start ax32

I saved that text as a file called StartAX.bat and placed it in my main document folder.  I then created a shortcut file on my desk to that batch file so I could have it run with admin privileges by default.  To do this, click the "Advanced" properties under the shortcut file to have it run with elevated privileges.  I also renamed it to "Start AX" so it's pretty easy to see what I need to do on my desktop.

I also created a batch file to stop all the services, and it only has one line - net stop mssqlserver /y - that will shut down all associated services.

As I was trying to put this together I noticed the commands for SQL had changed from previous versions, and I didn't realize at first that AX would launch just by typing the ax32 command.  I hope this helps you to be able to run AX on your laptop without having to overheat your machine when you're not using it.

Eric Newell

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