I long for a decent OS.

[Ral-Clan]

First, disable any RAM checking in the BIOS during powerup....that will shave a few seconds off boot time.

Next, use TWEAKUI and set it so that you get an early boot menu.  This way, you will see a boot menu before windows even begins to be loaded.  You can manually choose DOS from the menu, or you can set the timer for something short like 5 seconds.

Write a script in your DOS autoexec.bat file so that when MS-DOS starts WordPerfect for DOS or a text editor is automatically run.

This should all happen in under 20 seconds.

[Ral-Clan]

Hmm, this is definitely an interesting idea. However, I presume I'd lose NTFS access?

I don't know anything about that, but the whole idea of the early startup menu is that you're pre-empting Windows and running your modern computer as a bare-bones DOS box.  DOS (and Wordperfect for DOS) should be blazingly fast on a modern computer.