“Oddball” sleep/hibernate is what Macs do (well, any relatively recent ones anyway), and it’s awesome. Next time I get a PC I’ll try it’s sleep mode again, but I have yet to get one working right (the closest is an IBM thinkpad, but it refuses to sleep about 25% of the time, and since there’s no indication that it’s asleep once it’s closed up it tends to do a lot of traveling while not asleep and end up places with the “you battery is almost dead” warning up on the screen immediately before Windows shuts it down).
In any case, 2-5 seconds from hibernate is just plain unreal, to the point that I just don’t believe you. From sleep, or “oddball” hibernate, yes, and IMHO not all that spectacular. From true, no-power-until-you-open-the-clamshell hibernate? Not likely.
IMHO, regarding boot times, the flaw here isn’t just the crap that gets put in your “startup” folder; sometimes you want crap in there (well, not the Bonzai Buddy’s and Dell Power Centers of the world, but the other crap that is sometimes actually useful). I like the idea of being able to hit the power button, walk away, and come back five minutes later to a machine ready to go in every aspect (ie, with my applications all loaded in memory). I also like the idea of being able to hit the power button, not wait for all those applications to load, and get to work with whatever I want to do right off the bat.
The solution for me is that the one thing in my startup folder is a little script that pops up a timed dialog along the lines of “Click ‘Stop’ if you don’t want the standard apps to load up or ‘Go’ to load them immediately”, so that when I’m sitting here waiting to be able to do something I just hit “Stop”, and when I leave the laptop sitting there it times out and then loads everything, and in the occasion where I’m sitting here and still want everything to load I hit “Go” and it does.
There’s got to be something like this already sitting around in Windows, right? I mean, there’s not a really easy scripting solution to do this in yourself (although a DOS batch file could get you almost there), but surely someone at some point has decided that all the crapware doesn’t need to be loaded at startup every time. Right?