2 (same) CPUs - 1 faster

My friend and I both have the AMD Barton 2500+... and we bopth play warcraft III on BNET on which when a game starts we can see who loads faster and he always beats me by a few seconds... why is that?

Many possible reasons. If you're playing online, variation in connection speed will affect loading time. Locally, your hdd, ram amount and speed, mobo, other software running, and manufacturing variation all can change the loading time.

Connection
Me - 45.2 kbps
My friend - 26.4 kbps

RAM
Me - 512 mb @ 400 Mhz
My Friend - 1 gig @ 333Mhz

Hard Drive
Me - 1x 80 gig
My Friend - 1x 40 gig

Mobo
Me - Asus A7V8X-X
My Friend - msi k7n2g

... and he beats me in loading time playing warcraft while no other software is running ... just warcraft.. so what is it that makes him beat me

As I said before, there are too many different possibilities to say for sure what the difference is. His greater amount of ram probably helps, the speed and cache size of the hdd could do it, the speed of his cdrom, and other factors.

Are you using the same resolution in the game? It has heavy impact on loading times in WC3..

Yes i am pretty sure we are using the same resolution..

but he has a better video card
i got a radeon 9600 PRO and he has a radeon 9700 PRO

sometimes ram is taken up by background programs. also fragmentation of the hard drives can make a difference. connection speed doesn't usually effect online games. i frequently play at LAN centers and all the computers have the same setup, the same programs installed, virtually no background programs, and all run of a broadband/lan hub and some computers load at slower rates.
probably fragmentation. also, for some reason the age of the machine really effects how fast things start.
i've got a 7 year old brick, and a lot of the progs i use on it are the same. 5-7 years ago, the thing would have started the programs in 3 seconds, now it frequently freezes and takes ridiculously long times to load. even though i do have more hard drive space, and less background progs.
temperature sometimes effects how they run.
the video card i should expect wouldn't effect loading time, because for most games, they are loading the same 3d parts, textures and info. that would only effect the refresh rate - how fast it works.
don't dwell on it.

ok thank you