Just out of curiosity, is that the time between turning the power on and the OS starting to load or does that include the time it takes to load the OS? I know that you started out talking about firmware initialization, but boot time generally includes how long the OS takes to come up. In the latter case, there are ways to optimize that, by turning off services that you don't need started at boot. (As an example: if you only use MS Office once or twice a week, do you really need it loading in the background?) How you do that and how much control you have is, of course, very OS specific, but I don't know of any current desktop OS that doesn't let you do it at all.