I already have my email program begin at startup. It only takes about 60 seconds for my computer to be turned on and display the contents of my email. See Yahoo Messenger for one such program. If I shutoff my computer using the "Suspend" mode, I can get to my email within 15 seconds. This idea is a good one, but it already exists in practical terms.

I don't know about Macs, but you can schedule any program to run at startup (though not without some time wasted) in Windows XP using Scheduled Tasks. You can't do this in 98 (doesn't have startup/login options, just timed); I don't know about intermediate versions.

Macs do, too.

It has been awhile but I needed to get back to this one. I was not clear enough with my description of "start up". Think about a light switch. That is the speed I am talking about. It would seem to me that if you only loaded the necessary extensions, and put them in flash memory, you could have one program available the milli-second the power button was depressed. In the back ground the computer would be starting up as normal and announce the availability of other programs when they were fully loaded. Sure, I could wait a minute or two, use Mac's Automator to auto launch anything I wanted but I would still be wasting time; time that adds up to hours, days, months, years and eons when you include the population of computer users.

Ah. Trouble is that its often the OS makers that decide what extensions/libraries are "critical", and often it seems that there are plenty needed to run today's computers. What might work is a scheme where everything needed to run the basics are compiled ahead of time (perhaps even before the next time you logged in), and stored in persistent flash RAM. On startup, you would only then have to wait as long as it takes to copy the flash into main memory. From there, you could probably specify a priority list of your available applications, with these applications having their own versions of pre-compiled, quick-loading libraries. Updates which require restarting would alter the startup code, and a primary startup would be handy for those situations where irrecoverable errors have occured, perhaps making reinstallation unnecessary.

There is definitely some research being done on this sort of scheme, though I can't readily recall where to find it.