I just upgraded my HDD to an SSD drive. I am running a completely fresh install and enjoy the short boot time. I tweaked the startup to be as fast as I could by removing unneeded apps and such. Nor am I running a solid desktop background (which causes a 30-sec startup delay).

I have a 2.1ghz 64 bit laptop with 4 gigs of ram, so it's not a liquid-cooled speed monster, but I checked some super high end PC boot vids on YouTube and noticed that they startup in almost the same time as my machine.

I also noticed that the glowing Windows 7 animation plays all the way no matter how fast the PC is. I turned off the animation, and the startup time is unchanged. I turned on verbose startup info and noticed that it runs until the very end, where it looks like it just sits there for no reason waiting for something to happen for a few seconds.

So now I think that the Windows 7 startup animation has a timer built into it that forces the computer to wait for no other reason than to play the full animation. Super-fast XP boot vids on YouTube seem to start much faster (and not just because they "have less to load").

Am I imagining things?

My question is: How can I turn off not just the animation, but the timer for the animation.

Here is a vid that tipped me off, I have no relation to the poster. (warning: soundtrack might be loud) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5LkX3xejJ4