An IT staff of 36 does not suggest a small company. You're probably not even the mid-market.

Good advice. Hopefully I'll remember to reference it later.

Oh, I didn't question the benefits of the laptop, I only suggested the benefits of the desktop are rarely explored by purchasers.

Ultimately my post was aimed more at small businesses and the middle market than anything else, where the TCO is significantly higher and should be a major (if not THE major) deciding factor.

Energy is a *very* small part of TCO.

See Gartner's 2008 TCO study.

For the home user, the TCO comes mostly in repair costs should the laptop ever break. If they're buying $399 laptops and using them as disposables, this is less of an issue. Most people are still spending $900 on a laptop, and then get sticker shock when the motherboard dies and Dell wants a $550 replacement board three weeks after the three year warranty expires.

You're overlooking the case and all panels, the keyboard, the touchpad, the LCD, the optical drive, the battery, the AC/DC adapter, the AC/DC powerjack (mounted to motherboards), and so on and so forth.

The sad truth is that the oligopoly of notebook OEMs aren't interested in losing their repair and replacement profit.

Intel tried to correct that.

The ODMs (ASUS, Quanta, Compal) who manufacture the notebooks were quite interested. It could significantly reduce manufacturing costs.

Alas, the OEMs (Dell, HP, Gateway) who sell the notebooks wanted none of it. Their replacement parts have a very high profit margin.

The sad part is that many of these people would be better off with desktops. Desktops have a much lower total cost of ownership. (Even for home users.)

One of the many ways these companies have cut boot times is to disable S.M.A.R.T. testing at boot.

Of course, S.M.A.R.T. has saved countless users from total hard disk failure and total loss of data.

To me the answer isn't cutting seconds, but explaining the seconds. If users know that the extra 2 seconds could save them from losing their precious baby photos, I doubt anyone would complain.