Is this comparing a new install of vista vs old install of XP? If so, that's quite an unfair comparison I've got a 1.7Ghz centrino laptop with 512MB of ram. Original XP install from 3 years ago. However I run with no visual enhancements and have edited start up services to remove ones you don't need. My Xp boots to login screen in about 10-20 secounds. However logging takes around 10 secounds. Once its logged in disk grinds for about a minute, then its done. My windows 98 box boots up faster than my XP laptop, but its a new installation, my xp laptop has 3 years worth of crap on it. (my start menu on XP has 3 columns Ive got room for 1 more before i run out of screen space!) http://tweakhound.com/xp/bootvis/index.htm There is a program called bootvis that will measure you boot time, an allow you to tune.