Sounds like you need a laptop with the 8hr battery run time and learn how to use suspend.

My fully awake from suspend is between 5 to ... 10 seconds on xp laptop.

I dont know what kind of laptop you were using "a couple of years ago" because I have had nothing but laptops (Toshiba and IBM's) over the last 10 years and cant remember one ever taking more than maybe 5-10 secs from desktop to start working on any site. I dont know what kind of internet service you were using (maybe dial-up???) my speeds are based on cable

That's a good question.

I was using a Dell Inspiron 4000 w/ windows 2000 professional and before that a Compaq latitude (I think) also with Win2000 professional. The compaq had a lot of the typical corporate stuff on it, like outlook, office, etc.

Both of these computers took at least 3 minutes to get up and running, despite turning off apps from start-up, periodically running antivirus, ad-aware, etc., and also defragging and running disc-clean-up.

Based on all this, and also through conversations with strangers on their laptops (in places like Panera, starbucks, etc.) I thought that a couple minutes was typical.

If I could get the Inspiron to boot in less than a minute I would keep it. But right now it's too aggravating to use.

Any advice on that would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW...my cold start-up times with XP machines varied between about 2 and 4 minutes depending on start-up settings and whether or not my maintenance was up-to-date. Shut-down typically 10-30 seconds depending. Sleep took a few seconds. Wake-up a few more.

Have no experience with Vista but I've never seen a windows machine boot from cold in under a minute so good luck with that.

Present iMac running Leopard boots from cold in about 45 seconds. Shut-down in about 5. Sleep and/or wake-up maybe a second...hardly worth counting.

Had to check it out from a cold start. It took exactly 1min 20secs from off to a fully populated desktop "ready to rock and roll" state

I have a "Crawling Grinder" , too on startup, but I've been told that the number of start up items and items running in the background can definitely effect the time to rock and roll. Don't use it that much, so I take a nap while it's loading. Grady

fwiw
Just fooling with a new laptop and once I figured out how to auto login with Vista(netplwiz)... it took 25 seconds from the push of the power button until I can open IE and then an immeadiate click of a link on IE startup page reaches here in a blink.

Things are still loading in the background but the desktop is painted and at least IE & wifi works ! Now I need to figure out how to kill Vista blue welcome graphic at start.

Mikie you got Vista?

Jane

Yep... changing the keyboard on my xp laptop I washed the cookie crumbs out of the cooling fan and while remving it broke off the wire connector on the motherboard.. tiny little solder points you cant really solder ... so now it has a usb cord powering the fan.

So I splurged and spent some gift money . Toshiba Vista 1.46 mobile dual core, dual layer dvd burner, fancy intel graphics chipset, 6.lb 15.4-wide_xtra-brite, 1gb mem. lacking in buttons and card slots & maybe 4 hr battery, and minimal softwares ,,,, etc. OnSale $450 after Rebate.

Its HUGE sitting beside the 14.1 toshiba.