I recall it booting more slowly than 98 or ME, but I don't recall it being obnoxiously bad. I do remember disabling a lot of services I didn't think I needed, though.

The serialized service startup is what caused the slowness. Disabling services would have improved boot times.

well it has been a couple years since I've used it ;)

Sometimes I question why I remember this stuff.

Back then (probably xp era) I remember quirks like needing to configure the IDE controllers so if you didn't have both connectors on the PATA cable used it would spend a ton of time trying to detect a device where there wasn't one. You needed to go into device manager and disable that connector (unless you added a drive)

If you turned off a PC booting Windows 2000, you'd have an unbootable install of Windows 2000.

Source: I did that. Twice.

A heck of a lot faster than Windows XP or newer versions, that's for sure.

It was much slower than current OSes. Windows 2000 initialized Windows Services in a serialized order which caused lengthy boot times, even for an OOTB copy.

XP changes this to a parallel + delayed service start up, but 7 and 8 really focused on boot times.

given the current state of things, I'd take that slow boot over anything else ;)