Al-book start-up speed (v Windows XP)

[Dr. Trevor J. Hutley]

I had noticed that when I start up my 15.2" Al Powerbook, that the 
start-up is quite slow.
This seemed to be a result of my recent upgrade to Panther 10.3.2.

 From what I recall, my Ti-500 had a start-up time of about 1 min 2 
sec at best, but my current 15.2" Al-book was definitely slower.

I noticed this issue of start-up speed on Macintouch today.

This command in Terminal is supposed to fix this problem:

sudo cp -p 
/System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext/Contents/Resources/BootCacheControl 
/usr/sbin/

Two subsequent re-starts are required.

There is an alternative GUI version of this at MacUpdate: 
<http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13672>

I used the command in the terminal.  It has definitely improved the start-up.

 From the "chime" at start up, I observed this:

completely black screen	for 20 seconds
grey Apple		appears at 20 seconds
blue screen		appears at 46 seconds
start-up			complete at 54 seconds

Just for interest, I timed Windows XP start-up on Virtual PC6.
Virtual PC takes 2 seconds to display the Virtual PC List.

(Starting up XP from a saved PC state takes 9 seconds.)

Starting up XP from a turned-off-PC state took 52 seconds.

I noticed that Windows XP shows a graphic almost from the beginning 
of the start-up, whereas OS X gives a 20 sec black screen.  Not very 
user-friendly.

It is somewhat ironic that XP starts up in Virtual PC faster than the 
host OS (X) starts up!!

(Just for interest, I timed start-up (from shut down) of the Compaq 
2.8 Ghz PC I have in my office, that runs Windows XP Pro.
It was 47 seconds.)

Is my experience comparable to the rest of you running a similar system?

regards,  Trevor

1,25G4/15.2"/FW800/1Gb/80Gb-5400