Celeron vs i7 8700's doesn't help in this situation as I've got both in various rigs, with 8GB ram. Afterburner still starts slow, almost like there is a built in timer. I haven't tested if it's any faster on the i7 rigs though, just that it's still slower than that bat file. Moving up the ram any further won't make a difference as it still lags a bit on my main rig with 32GB of RAM.
You need to delay the start up of the mining program. You can use the timeout /t 60 in the bat file to start the miner 60 seconds later.
Perfect, thanks!