What Preliminaries?
Do you mean POST before the OS loads? What does POST have to do with the OS? Maybe we should include the time it took for the factory to assemble the machine along with boot time as well? Then Windows would stand a chance in the competition. No, POST time does not count, and cannot even be counted for OS boot time. The OS itself is used to clock its own boot. Either you use fine grained time in syslog, or a program that replaces init with timing software. Either way you get nanosecond accuracy. Lets see you hit a stopwatch button that fast.
"Linux would always freeze up at the password entry"
What? That is your terminal process running. There is nothing frozen up about it. Type, or don't, the OS doesn't care, as it is handling any number of processes at that point. In other words by the time you see a login prompt the system is booted.
You seem to want to count the time before, and after the boot process along with the boot process to me. Next we can pit Linux running against a Windows box turned off to see which can maintain its state longer. You're down with that right BALTHOR?
