I know about disabling the visual effects and removing bloatware and preventing unnecessary startup programs. Just not about the registry (turning on serialization), or RAID0.
I mentioned RAID0 as an example of hardware setup that can provide extra speed. I do not have RAID0 setup. Single SSD plus tweaking makes 22s restart as in the picture I posted above.
What I did is not difficult:
originally bought laptop with 1TB HDD 7200RPM
added single SSD as OS system disk - Samsung 840 Pro 256GB (Samsung provides currently fastest SSD for SATA 6GB/s setup). OS cloned from HDD do SSD.
tweaked registry
trimmed services and startup programs
turned on fast boot in BIOS (this may or may not be available in your system BIOS)
I did not touch visual effects because GPU handles them pretty well.
Fixed all the errors in Event Log with exception of Store-Licensing but I guess as long as I do not sign up for ms live this error will stay in Event Log
I do not really care about startup/restart times but I do a lot of photo editing and often system resources are exhausted fast so lean system is important.
RAID0 would make sense if you do video editing or anything that requires fast sequential read/write of large files (and as a "side effect" you get short boot time). For average user with small to medium random read/write access requirement RAID0 is unnecessary overkill.
So before you decide to buy SSD for your daughter, first tweak her laptop, see it this is enough. Maybe you she will not need anything beyond this.
edited
I forgot about this:
serialization registry tweak
Reduce Startup Delay to Run Desktop Apps Faster in Windows 8 | Team Windows 8