my imac takes less than 10 seconds to start up, about 3 to completely shut down, and maybe once a day i have to wait for something to load, but never longer than 2 or 3 seconds. when i click on safari it is up and the homepage is loaded almost instantly, traditional memory hogs like photoshop take about 3 seconds to completely load, and my itunes (which has about 40gb worth of music, not counting movies etc) takes about 2 seconds to load.