Re:Oh please. (Score 1)

In addition most work computers need to be left on at night as that is when all the system patches, scanning, etc is performed. If you turn it off, then when you come in and turn it on your system takes even longer to boot because all the patches that were missed over night will get applied as it is booting.

My Intel iMac at home actually sleeps and wakes up very nicely and quickly. The only thing I have had happen is have my ssh connections to other systems dropped. But, other then that press the space bar and its back up immediately. It slowed down a little (1-2 seconds) after I put an older USB hard drive on it, which that pig takes a moment to spin back up.

But, I have to agree on the PC's it is more of the PnP issue.. The iMac/OSX is very fast at booting, probably because it does not have to dork around with the hardware as much.

I would think you could tune your BIOS a bit to remove the auto-detection and such to improve things. Of course once you hit XP/Vista you are screwed. One thing I have noticed in the new Solaris 10 is they have multi-threaded the boot up processes by way of the service manager verses using the old fashion /etc/rc* style boot. Thrashes on the hard drive a bit, but allows for fast booting (once you are past hardware).