I built my pc back in august of 08, q6600, 4gb of corsair ram, 8800gts 512, and a 150gb raptor drive all on an asus maximus II. My boot times seem slower than other peoples, i have vista 64 and i know it takes longer than xp, but my friend who has a AMD quad core pc built by HP, his boots WAY faster than mine, roughly by a minute or so. It's the same with my friend who has an HP laptop, his boot times are much faster than mine as well. Do the PC vendors such as HP, Dell, IBM, ect.... format their drives in a certain way to allow for faster boot times? Just curious about the matter, feedback would be much appreciated, thanks.

I have generally found the inverse to be true...home/custom built systems boot much faster than 'off the shelf' ones.

There is something wrong with your setup if you are having boot times that measure in minutes with a Raptor drive...

That's what i figured, and that's why i'm so baffled by the slower booting times, especially with the raptor.

If this helps, my HDD activity LED with be on, then when the "status bar" appears it will be off, then go on again for a few seconds and then will be off again for about 10 seconds with a blank screen, then after that it kicks back on with the Windows "Bubble" Logo. Is there a way to get it so it is constantly pulling the boot sequence from my hdd rather than having it stop on and off?

It is 'pulling' the boot from the hard drive...the pauses are waiting for drivers and background programs to load or hardware detection to time out.

The first thing to do is to go into your BIOS and make sure that you are not using the 'long' POST and that it isn't looking for hardware that doesn't exist...if you aren't using a COM or Parallel port, disable it, in BIOS.

Then, follow the directions here...http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=60009

Went into my bios and disabled my firewire and esata. I now have 5 "status bar" passes and it boots within 30-45 seconds. thanks again

Umm...yeah, if you aren't using either one, they can take, typically, about 30 seconds each to time out.