There is NO WAY an HDD laptop boots Windows 98 in 10 seconds. Even booting Windows 98 in a VM on a 1yr old processor backed by _friggin RAM_ takes slightly more than that.

Windows 98 used to take 1-3 minutes to boot on that level of hardware. And if you had any type of network, it was probably even more than 3 minutes. There is a reason hibernation (even at the BIOS level) was all the rage these days.

For better or worse, MS did something on Windows during the XP era that finally made it be able to boot fast (on modern hardware at least). Win2K still has insanely long "delays".