I have an Inspiron 6000 with a broken screen lying around but I have a couple of other laptops with Ati cards which are better if you want to run out to an RGB monitor and use the original resolutions (240p and such). As for S-Video vs LCD I think in many cases I would choose the LCD as the lesser of two evils. 640x480 or 800x600 flickering TV-out with perhaps overscan issues is a menace to my brain though compare the two if you can.
You can't really start Windows without starting Windows though yeah you can remove the boot logo. Linux is the way to go if you want a quicker boot straight to a frontend but setting that up can require some patience. It's really slick though once you have it setup. There are a variety of live cd's with Mame and other stuff on them pre configured for you such as GroovyArcade http://arcade.groovy.org/
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