Question: What is the difference between Automatic and Automatic (Delayed Start) for a property setting for a Windows service? i.e. what do I gain or lose by setting my service as one or the other?

Running the service on Windows Server 2008 x64

Answer: 
A service marked as **Automatic (Delayed Start)** will start shortly after all other services designated as **Automatic** have been started. In my experience, this means that they are started 1-2 minutes after the computer boots.

The setting is most useful in lessening the "mad rush" for resources when a machine boots.

Note that when you have 20 services all being started at the same time, each will start up slower as it competes with the others for slices of the machine's precious resources (CPU/RAM/Disk/Network). *That is, each service takes longer to become available!*

If you have a few services that are critical, then you may want to set those few to **Automatic** and set as many of the others as you can to **Automatic (Delayed Start)**. This will ensure that the critical services get the most resources early and become available sooner, while the non-critical services start a bit later (which by definition is ok).
Here's an example. I have a SonarQube service that depends on my MySQL database service. So, I set the MySQL service to automatic to get the database up and running when the machine boots. I have the SonarQube service set to the automatic (delayed) start to make sure it starts up AFTER the database service it depends upon is started.

If you have a dependency like this it can be helpful to use the delayed start to make sure dependent services start up in the right order.