One of the claimed features that made me upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 was the boot-up speed increases. Before the upgrade using Ubuntu 8.10 it took my computer 55 seconds to boot up to the login screen. Including a very fast (2 second) login, it took 1:25 until the desktop was “usable”. Starting Thunderbird and Firefox immediately took until 1:55 to bring up both windows.

After I installed Ubuntu 9.04 I timed the login. I was impressed with the speed increases. It took
35 seconds to get to the login screen. Including a very fast (2 second) login, it took 1:05 until the desktop was “usable”. Starting up both Thunderbird and Firefox were ready to use by one minute and thirty seconds after bootup.

The bootup time of Ubuntu 9.04 is identical to that of Windows Vista (the shutdown time is approximately 5 seconds faster)