Windows-3.x would scream in 32M of Ram with a 100MHz processor and a 40M HDD.

As the technology grows in speed, performance and throughput, the load placed on it by software makers grows similarly, so it has been taking 1-5 min for a PC to boot, literally for decades.

For a short time, SSDs probably will decrease boot times, but soon new "needs" will arise that bring boot times back to where they are now.

As SSDs with uSec access times make the process faster, I expect there will be more things to do at boot time, evolving over time, and the boot time will remain about the same, in the 1-5 minute range; the PC will just be doing MUCH more during boot.

Look back from today - in 1980 who could have conceived of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, firewall, internet security and other features we just take for granted? If that machine had needed to load all of those things, boot times would have been in hours instead of minutes. No one would tolerate that.

But as speed and performance improved, and the world changed, more things became absolute necessities for everyone's computers. The boot times remained about the same, even though the speed and performance of hardware has grown many thousand-fold.

SSD could improve HDD throughput many thousand-fold, but I believe that will simply mean that thousands of times as much data will be accessed or loaded from them during the boot process, leaving the real-time of the boot event about the same