For a machine like that, Intended to have it's data out on the web somewhere. I can see that.
No, just the email boxes are out on the web. There's another 20GB of mostly static data in the CF card, and it *can* be rewritten at will, when done deliberately. Just not by default.
Me, I'm not so good at keeping things like bookmarks synced across various logins.
That concern/idea is there regardless of running from disk or RAM.
I'm finding all this very interesting. I have a little Sony pcg-sr33k that is begging to have one or two CF cards slipped into the place of the hard drive. It only has a 10gb hard drive as it is.
Though, it's a bit short of ram to be giving any away as a drive overlay.
You might be very surprised there. If it can boot/run from a Linux LiveCD, then it has enough RAM for the job. Easy test.
The only RAM difference between using a R/W disk and a mostly R/O disk/CF, is for temporary files. Those will occupy RAM in the latter setup. But they are small, and are not saved across reboots. On my little notebook here, they total 2-20MBytes.
Disable swap, disable browser disk-caches, and hit the road with it!
Cheers