Those boot times are from the same machine - a celery 566 overclocked to 707 with 256M. The 36 sec boot time is after the BIOS post and the OS starts loading. It ends at the functional desktop. In this time, it loads an IRC session, ZoneAlarm Pro, McAfee VirusScan, a FTP Server, Apache and I'm sure I'm missing a few things. The Win2k boot didn't include the IRC session, the ftpd or anything else except the firewall.

Of course, Slackware boots and gets me into WindowMaker in like 25-30secs, including the time to manually log in and start X.

As for benchmarks, when Win2k first came out, there were benchmarks that showed that NT4 was actually faster than Win2k when both had memory over 256M (or maybe it was 128M). Not many people seemed to notice, or care. I don't put a lot of stock in benchmarks, whether on accident or with malicious intent, benchmarks can be made to show whatever you want.