Sometimes when you're waiting for the logon screen to show up, you feel that it take immensely long time for the system to start. So I decided to gauge it. Here're the results from my brand new T43p/2GB/60GB7200RPM/UXGA/ (2668H2G).
12 s. black XP screen shows
39 s. blue WinXP logon screen shows
45 s. through the fingerprint logon procedure (after one failing attempt)
1.02 s. desktop picture shows
1.30 s. all services started (currently 70 of them running, including 7 svchost.exe)
Other field studies in the subject are welcome

. For a comparison, my old Tecra 8100 used around 5 min for the same procedure, but then of course, it didn't have the same amount of ram and so on.