[Symbiote]

You can see the typical boot sequence of a standalone machine here [1]. It's about 10 seconds.

Underpowered networks / network servers in a school could increase this, if the computer was configured to load resources from the network at boot.

https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1284 (this is an A5000, but the startup time is similar).

[micv]

I think that's probably it. They were all hooked up to a network, and it was never anything other than ropey.