Boot up times: Comparison

[#1]

Because I dual-boot I have been able to do a little experiment, just out of interest.
Have timed boot up in Windows 7 and it came to 1 minute 30 seconds.
In Ubuntu it came out at 45 seconds, exactly half.
The timing was from pressing the switch on the laptop to having a fully working, internet connected machine.  In Windows I took this to when the 'busy' circle stopped.
I have selective start-up in Windows so am only loading Windows items plus Kaspersky.
I thought that Ubuntu 10.04 was quick to load but not that quick!
Later will do shut down because have noticed that Linux does this seemingly instantly.

[#2]

yep it is fast to startup & shutdown, ignoring the BIOS part, it takes my system about 30 sec to a full desktop, and about 15 to shutdown  
It actually takes longer to got through the BIOS on my Dell than Mint takes to load 

[#3]

The BIOS start is going to be the same regardless of OS, of course. I haven't measured it, but my Linux Mint dual core Athlon at home boots in about half the time of my quad core Win7 machine at work.

[#4]

Quote

The timing was from pressing the switch on the laptop to having a fully working, internet connected machine.  In Windows I took this to when the 'busy' circle stopped.

I have two similarly spec'ed  desktop machines side-by-side, one with Windows XP, the other with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx,  because it is difficult to know when Windows has actually finished booting when racing the machines for startup times, I open Firefox at the first opportunity (on each) and stop-the-clock when the resulting homepage has completed loading.  On bootup Windows can take MANY tens of seconds longer to get to that point (than Ubuntu), but it is a more realistic test as it is the moment when you can actually start doing something useful with the machine.
Needless to say if I start the machines at the same time, on Ubuntu I can usually do a google search in Firefox, check 10 accounts for new email in Evolution, AND fully shutdown BEFORE Windows has stopped faffing about running updates and all the other infuriating nonsense and even got to any usable state ! - Oh and then wait ages to shutdown afterwards - WHY !