is the mbp15 i5 slow to boot / start apps?

[stefan1975]

i have had my mbp15 2.4ghz i5 wth the stock drive for some weeks now and overall am quite pleased with it.

however i was expecting to be blown away by the speed of it since i am coming from a 1st gen eee and a dell optiplex gx270 2.0ghz p4 4x256mb ram from 2003 .....but i am not!

in all honesty i must admit that i was expecting more, battery life is great and number crunching is far superior on th i5, but my P4 running Ubuntu 10.10 boots in around 17 seconds from cold start to gnome while the MBP15 with OSX 10.6.4 takes roughly a full minute for a full boot, that is around the same time my win7 boots and no where near ubuntu 10.10, is that normal?

also i did a very scientifically sound experiment starting numerous apps like chrome, safari and opera. all of which take multiple 'bounces' to start where in ubuntu chromium starts near instantly.

of course i couldnt even begin to run adobe cs5 on the p4 or the eee, but in lighter apps there is hardly any difference.

i know a sandforce SSD would make a world of difference here and it is on my wishlist for 2011, but even with a 2010 HDD i was expecting more compared to the 2003 dell. was i hoping for too much?

 

[alust2013]

The problem with your boot/launch times is the hard drive. a 5400 RPM HDD is going to be a little slow, that's just how it is. Not sure exactly why linux is quite that much faster, but I switched to a 7200 RPM drive and that significantly improved my app loading times, and it boots a bit faster as well.

 

[stefan1975]

well i knew 5400rpm wouldnt be breaking any records, but i had hopes a 2010 drive of 320gb would be at last on par or better then a 20gb 2003 drive.

besides the difference between ubuntu 10.10 in 17 seconds and OSX in a minute is extreme. windows is also slow but my ubuntu is also running compiz, docky, cube, etc. but still it is faster in running low tech apps like chrome and booting.