GObonzo :
What are you talking about, "MS should have rebooted the machine before going into hibernate"? that would totally negate the point of hibernation if the system were rebooting before hibernating.
After having Windows 8.1 running for a few months, with 5-6 separate programs starting with Windows, it took 12 secs at the fastest to totally boot from a cold start. That's not from hibernation. I'm sure with no startup applications running, fresh disk clean, & defragment you could easily get it to cold start at <10.
Some people have problems with coming out of hibernation mode (though it might be standby) so i might have that wrong, but i have had countless W8 machines had problems with major updates (some minor). This is the only explanation that i have that W8 should have the option to shut down or at least reboot to hibernate to clear any problems in the existing boot. Unless that's isolated and W8 does not go into hibernation mode as default.
GObonzo :
The right hardware? Any computer made in the past 5 years with an SSD drive and a UEFI bios instead of a regular BIOS.
Boom... one second or instant bootup times.
That's simply incorrect as users get different boot times. You do not get 1 second boot times just from buying a new computer with SSD and UEFI bios if that were true more users would be mentioning 1 second instead of 5 sec, 10 seconds.. some higher and a few lower:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1323261/your-fastest-ssd-boot-times
I did not say it was impossible you can boot W8 in 1 second but to say that all recently built PCs are capable of this is not correct as some PC's are still built with no SSDs. Would these PC's boot W8 in a 1 second with HDDs-
http://store.hp.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryListingView?catalogId=10051&categoryId=88166&langId=-1&storeId=10151
No, even some SSDs and UEFI bios/motherboards would have to ensure they are top performers. If that wasn't the case my PC i built a few years ago should boot W8 in 1 second had i got an SSD instead of a HDD but even i know that PC would never boot W8 in 1 second, because of the lack of having UEFI, i do have the ability to boot larger HDDs but that's it, no fast boot times, otherwise i would have found a use for W8.