[BLKMGK]

Doing some of these myself, concurrent booting of system processes on a multicore system sounds useful, I am also looking at nodiratime rather than noatime for safeties sake and feedback on that would be appreciated. turned off all sorts of things like the BT manager, print queue junk, and evolution alarm since I don't use this box for mail. Still looking through suggestions looking for those that won't impact general data safety but provide some boost. What I've done so far seems pretty safe I think and ought to help at least a little.

Edit: found a GUI utility names BUM that looks good for managing services and whatnot. Bootchart also looks interesting but I've not yet run it. with this you can see what part of your boot process is problematic and slowing things.