Once I was merely annoyed at the long time it took Windows Vista to start, but now I’m really ticked off.

I’ve spent a good portion of the first half of this month on the road. That meant I was using my trusty PC laptop.

For the record, I use a Lenovo (nee IBM) Thinkpad X61s. It’s a small form factor laptop, tiny 10-inch screen, light weight, long battery life. I’m pleased with it, but severely frustrated at how blasted long it takes Windows Vista to start.

Just to ensure that I’m not crazy, I brought out my trusty stopwatch. Windows Vista on my laptop takes 90 seconds to go from completely-turned-off to the logon prompt. That’s a long time!

Even though you can see the logon prompt, sometimes you can’t log in: you type a few characters, but for some dumb reason the hard drive starts going crazy.

What the hell is the hard drive doing?!

The computer hasn’t even started! I’m just typing in my password. Yet the damn hard drive light is going crazy like I’m downloading the entire Internet. And the hard drive spazzes out even when I’m not connected to a network. What is it doing?

After typing in my password, I press Enter. That’s when Windows Vista gets truly nasty. It fools you. For a moment, you see the desktop. You might even be taunted with the mouse pointer looking like it’s ready for action. Don’t try to get any work done, though; Windows Vista still hasn’t finished loading.

It’s just plain cruel: You see the desktop. You can move the mouse for a second, but then it freezes or disappears. The hard drive keeps churning. Startup programs spangle the Notification Area with their tiny icons and annoying pop-up messages.

Eventually the Sidebar appears. I use Sidebar on my laptop primarily because its appearance is a good clue that you can finally — finally use the laptop. But no, there’s more loading, more delays, more freezes. I try to load Mail, but it takes a while to come up, as does Firefox.

Total time elapsed from when I pressed Enter to input my password to when I can really use the laptop: 3 minutes, 34 seconds. That means that when I wanted to check my e-mail between flights, I had to wait a total of five minutes before I could use my laptop. That’s not just annoying, it’s a frickin’ pain in the ass. There is no excuse for it.

I don’t give up easily. Thinking I’m a clever human, I decided that I would hibernate the laptop instead of turning it off.

The startup time for hibernation from power-on to the logon screen is only 35 seconds, not 90. That’s an improvement, and it makes sense: Hibernation mode means that all the crap loaded by Windows is already loaded. Supposedly.

After pressing Enter to input my password, an additional 14 seconds elapse before I have a useable computer with a hibernation start. That makes for a total of about 50 seconds verses five minutes.

Obviously, hibernating your PC makes more sense. But on the road I did recall that starting the PC from a hibernated state often took just as long as a raw startup. In other words, it still seemed like a long time before I could start using my laptop.

Of course, it’s widely known that Windows Vista is an awful, horrible, vile, despised operating system. I’ll give people that, though once started I don’t have an issue with Vista. So I decided to try the same experiments with a laptop that has the newer, improved Windows 7 on it. Here are the results:

Time from start up to logon prompt: 54 seconds.

Time from Enter key press to useable laptop: 16 seconds.

Holy smokes! And that’s for a cold start.

Already I’m liking Windows 7. As a laptop user, I can see how having Windows 7 on my machine will most definitely save me startup time. Now if I can only figure out the weird new names and strange locations where things are buried, I’ll be fine.