>> My PC at work is barely powerful enough to run *one* OS, let alone 
>> two. It _would_ be quite useful for test purposes though.
> 
> That's one of the main reasons I went for a quad core with lots of 
> memory when I upgraded.

I can see how that would be the case. ;-)

>> However, the idea of being able to just plug in a USB stick and click 
>> an icon and instantly have a complete Linux environment set up exactly 
>> the way I want it is... pretty neat, actually.
> 
> You might have problems with IO speed if you do that. USB is a lot 
> slower than SATA.

Depends what you want to do. Running Damn Small Linux from a USB drive 
is probably *faster* than running it from a CD-ROM due to the vastly 
superior seek time. (CD-ROM drives typically have a horrible seek time!) 
Also, DSL is based on KNOPPIX and uses a cloop compressed filesystem 
image, so there's less data to shift (but more CPU load).

If I get bored enough maybe I'll benchmark it. But either way, it's a 
trivial matter to copy a folder off the USB drive and onto a spare 
folder on the local HD, run it for a while, and then just delete it when 
you're done. That's about the easiest install/uninstall procedure 
imaginable! ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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