Cost is pretty important here. I might be willing to pay up to $180 for a 32GB or larger SSD. But beyond that is not cost effective for me yet.

Meanwhile, I believe I've worked out a nifty solution, which I can demo at The Party, for anyone interested.

Pretty simple, actually:

• I have K+Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" installed on the CF card now, with all of my fav goodies, including a full empeg/Hijack build system etc..
• Plus VMware and some VMs for that other O/S, so that SWMBO can access her Italian language s/w (web based, IE-only).
• At boot time, we now have two choices: boot/run from the CF card, or..
• Boot from CF, but run with a tmpfs (RAM) overlay on it, so nothing gets written to the drive unless we really want that to happen.

This is more or less what all of the LiveCD's do, except simpler.

And the machine is now *very* fast, silent, and seems to gets a little extra run time from the battery.

Cheers