Yup, same experience for me. My only computer currently is a pathetically old 750 mhz/128 mb ram computer and it's markedly faster when resuming from hibernate... The computer I'm writing from right now is also a 2ghz Acer laptop (my gf's) and it's the same story here...
Just decided to run a test on the old computer (the only one I have since my good one died ½ a year ago) and oh my good
the difference is so striking. When I booted it up the times for Windows XP Professional start-up were as follows:
Windows XP start-up screen: 31 sec.
Welcome to Windows screen: 1 min 46 sec.
Windows started and hourglass on: 2 min 48 sec.
Hourglass gone and system operational: 4 min 46 sec.
(BTW these times really made me long for my new Macbook, oh when will it be here?
)
Anyway, at this point I then hibernated the system, of course here it has to be noted that if you had lots of memory-stealing programs running when you hibernated, the startup process will of course be longer, but since I can't be bothered actually doing anything on that old ****** computer I just hibernated without any programs running. Normally when I do have to use the computer and I'm shutting down, I do it the same way, eg. close all programs and then hibernate from the desktop, without anything running, so it is ready for the next time I'm going to use it. The start-up times from hibernation were:
Continuing Windows screen: 17 sec.
Windows with hourglass: 32 sec.
Windows operational: 40 sec.
The difference in start-up time is 4 minutes and 6 seconds!!
Speaking in percentages you shave off 86%
Of course the problem is a well-known one that is inherent with XP. A newly installed XP system would probably boot in around the time it took to get to the "windows with hourglass" screen, but as soon as an XP install has been around for a few months the system will clutter up with programs running in the background, registry key problems and all those other little quirks inherent in Windows (when I actually had to use Windows I re-installed the OS every 4-5 months). The time in which windows is open, but with the hourglass and not really operational is a real time waster (about 2 minutes) and without those additional 2 minutes I actually find a boot time of 2½ minutes to be quite acceptable for such an old computer.
However, when you hibernate you sidestep all those problems, so however poorly written Windows XP is, Microsoft were clever enough to give a way to sidestep those oh-so-delightful built in problems. 40 seconds to boot up a system on a 5½ year old computer is actually a really superb time IMO...
*edit GHz, I meant GHz!!!