From: "Frank Haber" 

It depends a lot on the hardware and BIOS, as well as what loads at
startup, of course.  I have an old laptop that takes three minutes to boot
98OE, half of that with a black screen.  It's always been a heart-stopper -
will it enumerate this time?  What's wrong now?

I have another old PII that boots in 40 seconds, about what my fastest XP boot takes.

That's why I value the "noise" of the /SOS option in boot.ini in NT.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5