mine's about 40 secs now from a power-off state...not bad for a machine built back in '03!

45 seconds from cold boot to desktop.

Regards Howard

About 18-20 seconds from a cold boot to a fully-working desktop. Helped mainly by the Raptors I guess.

yeah, those raptors make all the difference in the world. my friend has got two of 'em in a RAID 0 system upon my recommendation, and it proved to be a wise investment.

Yeah so do I. It completely eliminated the annoying 3-second or something lag in Oblivion when it loaded new areas from the HDD. A question though, since I haven't tried, will it also affect the speed at which the drive defragments?

seeing as how two raptors in raid 0 will have way better performance than the average 7200 RPM drive, yes.

Ok thanks. I guess there's nothing bad to be said about the Raptors at all! =D

well, nothing bad except for the price (my 7200RPM maxtors weren't my first choice)

I wonder how Vista's smart boot will compare....