How fast will windows boot on a laptop hard drive

Laptop's have 5400rpm hard drives to save battery power. Unfortunately, that comes at a performance penalty.
I can't tell you how long the boot time would be, but rest assured that a SSD will be much faster. With a SSD, boot time will be about 30 seconds.
But, the real reason to get a SSD is for everything else that you do. Windows maintenance is much quicker. A SSD really transforms a laptop.

I can heartily endorse the change to a SSD.

I second the motion. I've mentioned in other posts here on Tom's that my Dell XPS M1530 has gone from roughly 1:30-2 minutes boot to desktop, to less thn 30 seconds.

But like geofelt mentions - all programs and work gets done faster.

IMO an SSD is a must for a laptop these days. There's no reason Not To!

i am asking what the boot time would be with my system.

it's impossible for anyone to tell you that - you would have to time it, and then tell us  

your other option is to look for youtube videos for your specific computer or reviews. Perhaps someone has youtubed an unboxing and you can watch how fast the bootup is out of the box fresh from HP

As you use it and perhaps get different startup programs, it will change.

i tested my computer boot time with the original hdd and i found that i could get anywhere from 30seconds to up to a minute.

I can't imagine a HDD booting in the amount of time it takes an SSD to boot - you must have refreshed it from sleeping, or a hibernation, but I doubt from a dead state completely off it takes 30 seconds to get to being able to open IE on the desktop, let's say.
Mine with an SSD takes 28-32 seconds

I pressed "shut down" on the start menu, but i counted it to where i could log in. to get to IE it takes about 50-55 seconds.

a one minute boot with a 5200rpm HDD is a pretty good boot time. Like I said already, you'll only get 30 seconds faster with an SSD, BUT IE will beup and ready to search in seconds. As with the HDD, after refreshing icons on the desktop, it might take another minute to get to where you can start typing in the search bar of IE - why don't you time it.
Dead off to when you can type in IE, without having a hiccup typing in your password to get to the desktop...

I wonder how much better a 7200rpm or a hybrid drive would be.

Faster potentially, but worse for your battery, why not just be happy with a new laptop as is?
if you are bothered about slow booting (for whatever reason...) put it to sleep instead of turning it off, my netbook is on desktop in 5 seconds that way
Moto