Of course Win7 boots quickly as a brand-new install. So did Vista. Let’s hear from you again after a year’s use, my guess is a two-minutes boot at the very least…
Great. Now try Ubuntu versus Haiku. <eg>
Did you install Win7 from Retail/OEM dvd? From my experience Windows’ boot time is not so bad at all straight from a fresh install using M$'s media. However what a lot of users (especially laptop users) face is their version of Windows install came preloaded from the hardware manufacturer and most of them are unnecessarily bloated to a crawl (even the recovery disk will not help here, as they reintroduce the bloatware). I gave up on Vista preinstalled on my laptop. It is just too painfully slow while openSUSE handles anything I throw at it perfectly, even HD playback rotfl!
Heck. There’s a bunch of update today on openSUSE 11.2rc2. Booting on xfce including typing password and opening firefox takes just 23 seconds on my machine.:rolleyes:
Ubuntu Karmic is indeed lightning fast, its definitely faster then any of the windows OS’s and slightly faster then openSUSE 11.2 on my machine.
But not by much
Is the boot time of any relevance at all? I doubt it. First of all, my machines run 24 hours a day. And when I HAVE to reboot (e.g after a kernel update) it takes more than an hour to do the fsck on an ext3 fs 
Pulled it from my MSDN account so it’s free of useless apps (well besides the ones microsoft decides I ought to have like windows media player…)
Hi
Whilst my ASUS netbook came with XP Home the restore image came with
ghost so after cleaning out the garbage (I use XPlite) I was going to
use that to create a new image.
Alas I’ve only booted into it a couple of times (just to get updates
and defrag/compress) and never got around to creating an image.
On subsequent installs of openSUSE and Moblin I’ve just kept shrinking
it… maybe one day it will be like the incredible shrinking <insert
something> and just disappear 
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.37-0.1-default
up 11:25, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.04
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.18
SAS drives? I assume you mean Serial-Attached-SCSI? Mind telling me where you found a controller, please? I (ahem) have a few IBM SAS disks I would like to try which didn’t really initialize when I tried SAS->SATA (a pointless endeavour in any case due to bandwith loss). Or are they sitting on a backplane?
It’s an Apple Mac Pro RAID card - hideously expensive too (read: ridicilously overpriced) but since I didn’t pay for anything in this machine it wasn’t an issue for me.
HP sells their Smart Array PCI Express cards too - you might want to take a look at them. They go for a few hundred euros up without cache memory (add 256+256 or 512+512 for Read/Write cache or you’re gimping your drives and will have horrendous write performance). The HP Smart Array cards are also awesome in Linux, fully supported right out of the box.
Do you have a datacenter in your apartment?
No, why? rotfl!
For me boot times are not relevant, since my workhorse is on all the time (it does scheduled tasks too). And for a portable computer, anything more than say 10 seconds is too long. It’s not just booting to a login prompt. It’s also the time to fire up the apps. That’s why I would want a portable computer to have suspend and hibernation. I want to be able to open up the lid and start using it where I left off.
But this is not to diminish the efforts of developers working on speeding up startup. It’s work that needs to be done.
Boot times can always be improved (to an extent :)).
As for me, I only suspend my PC to RAM (standby) but I shut it down at night. Then when I use it next day, it boots in a bit more than 30 seconds. Impressive.