Computer booting question

[disc13]

Hi, I was wondering how I could decrease my computer boot time. I just went back home to visit my parents, and they just recently got a cheap Dell. That thing goes from power button to Windows fully loaded in 25 seconds. My relatively powerful computer takes about a minute . I've done most of the tricks that I've managed to Google, but have realized that it's not Windows XP slowing me down, it's the hardware stuff that goes on beforehand that screws me.
When I boot the computer it takes about 10 seconds for it to count up the memory, and after that it'll display all my hard drives, CD drives, floppy drives, and then after that it'll show a bunch of lines of text and numbers, saying something is initializing before it finally shows the Windows XP splash logo (which I've disabled). I've noticed on my parents computer it takes almost no time to go from power button to the Windows splash screen.
Can anyone offer any advice? Thanks in advance!

[Phaedrus]

You might start by optimizing your bios settings. For instance you can skip the ram count. Here is a one guide (http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/BIOS_Guide/BIOS_Guide_Index.htm) at rojaks... Google for more, there are plenty out there.

[disc13]

thx for the link. It seems that most my problems can be avoided by selecting the quick-boot/quick-post setting in my bios. Unfortunetely, my Gigabyte BIOS has no such option, unless it's hiding somewhere (which I doubt, as I looked pretty throughroghly). I've done some of the other things I've managed to Google up, but the memory counting, hard drive detecting, and verifying DMI pool is still killing me. Any suggestions? Thx...

[z-lite]

One thing I hate is the computer taking up more time than necessary to detect the IDE drives. I go into the bios and under the Primary and Secondary drives, I have it detect what kind of device I'm using so that it's manually configured and the BIOS doesn't have to waste time detecting the drive every time. I disable ports I don't need like parallel and serial, and the floppy controller since I don't use it along with IDE channels I'm not using. My MSI board takes about 2-3 seconds to check my 2GB of RAM and then it's on its way to booting Windows.