“W8 seems to boot faster than W7.”
That’s because W8 isn’t really booting. It’s just pretending to boot, while under the hood its really just going into and out of hibernate mode.
That is true, and i had rarely shut down under XP, but used the old Slawdog shutdown app which would go into standby after the time of nonactivity that you choose, and i still use it under W/8 (like XP, the native powercfg will not standby as programmed), but W/8 still boots faster to usability even from cold start.
W/7 on the laptop is fast booting though. I thank God for both.