I doubt increasing ram from 96 MB is going to make a difference, if you had 32 MB, it'd be a different story.
I use the hibernate feature of my laptop and can boot to my previous working environment in about 30 seconds in Win2000. IBM?s (as do Compaqs and Toshibas) have so much junk that boots up, that it takes way too long. Go into msconfig and remove what you don't need. Also take things like "fastfind" and "office startup" out of your startUp folder. Something else that can GREATLY increase boot time and file access, defrag.