My netbook boots in under 35 seconds, so your situation is not the norm. It
should boot in less than a minute. When it takes a long time to boot then it
might be checking drives for errors using fsck. Since you are in a graphical
boot then you are not likely to see what it is doing. I would try a text
boot to watch the boot process to see what is going on. At the grub boot
loader press F6 and then in the bottom remove the words quiet splash. Then
press whatever it says at the bottom in the message portion to boot. I think
that it is b but right now am drawing a blank.

As it boots look for any delays and report back what you are seeing.