iMac: Bootup times....

As I have said in a previous post, my iMac boots a lot faster than my Dell Inspiron 1705 laptop running Vista. How much faster is it? Well, I actually timed it today. It takes 35 seconds for my iMac to boot up from a cold start. That is the time it takes between pressing the power button to where I can move the mouse pointer and launch a web browser. For Vista, it took 1 minute 35 seconds to get to the same point. However, that doesn't tell the entire story. The iMac was very responsive at that point. Vista was still busy loading stuff in the background, so the system was very sluggish and unresponsive. I'm really impressed with the responsiveness of the Mac. It seems much faster than an equivalent PC running Windows. The specs on my iMac as of today are as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.4 GHz
• 3 GB of RAM (just upgraded with a 2 GB module)
• 320 GB 7200 rpm hard drive

It's pretty much the lower end 24" iMac with the aluminum case as pictured here. My Dell laptop has the following configuration:

• Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.0 GHz
• 2 GB of RAM
• 80 GB 7200 rpm hard dive.

My iMac does have more memory, but it was already booting up that fast before I upgraded the memory from 1 GB to 3 GB.