Booting up and starting up a browser is much faster on a regular macbook than it is for your average 1000$ laptop. All the bloatware crap like anti-virus also slows down a mac if you have it installed. However, if you start installing a lot of stuff on either a mac or a windows machine, you're going to have a considerable slow down.

no.

You can get Fedora Core 4 down to a 10 second boot time if you want.

I don't think boot speed is a useful measure of anything.

Id say Macs are faster than PCs

they are faster than PCs with same specs, because the programs are written for the specs the Macs have, which means they can utilize the processing power that's there far more efficiently

Can't comment on general tasks, but gaming will be slower on a Mac. AMD and Nvidia spend less optimising Mac/Linux 3D drivers than Windows because the market isn't there, so there will be a significant performance difference. It's not Apple's fault, it's just an indicator of how small Mac gaming is compared to Windows.

PC has always been way faster than Mac.

A $500 build-yourself PC will usually outrun a $1000 Mac.

hardly back in the PPC days it switched back in forth  almost every 6 months, G3 vs P2,  photoshop results vs video rendering. man when the G5 first tore on the scene they decimated all PC in encoding and almost all tasks on adobe software (excluding premier which had not returned ot the mac platform yet)

And if you remember in 2007 the 15 inch mac book pro was the fastest windows vista laptop (the painful irony) for awhile as benched by PC  world. this title was lost on 10/25/2007

http://www.pcworld.com/article/136649-3/in_pictures_the_most_notable_notebooks_of_2007.html

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/30190/review/macbook_pro.html

only if you are talking about gaming has any since of what your saying been true, but if your doing work on your computer your statement is garbage 

Aren't Mac OS labtops going to boot up faster because Mac doesn't autoload programs like Windows does?

Meaning that the Labtop will boot up sooner but programs will boot up slower?

Macs are more stable. My mac hasn't been shut down, turned off, or restarted in over 6 months. The OS is much better at reallocating resources when programs are exited. The computer still runs just as smooth. Let me see a PCWhore say the same thing.