Ok, here's the problem. Or, rather question.   
      
    I have a netbook, bought at a garage sale very cheap. The hard   
    drive was missing, and new hard drives for that are very   
    expensive. Solid state drive.   
      
    I have known about virtual computing for a long time, but never   
    got into it. What I am thinking of is, using an SD card as my   
    hard drive, setting it up to boot to XP, then running it as a   
    virtual machine.   
      
    What I don't know is, does the virtual machine run completely in   
    ram, or run off the HD? If it runs out of ram that should   
    drastically reduce the write cycles to the SD card, thus   
    prolonging it's life. OTOH, even writing to the SD card may be   
    worth it, I can buy a dozen or two SD cards for the price of one   
    SSD.   
      
    The problem with that is, SD cards are not as fast as SSDs, or   
    even ordinary hard drives. So, if running in ram it should be   
    very fast. Is it?   
      
    This will be used for a very limited selection of tasks, web   
    browsing when out of the house, limited word processing, maybe   
    video or audio. I suspect I could save files to a cloud server,   
    but I don't want to get into Google Chrome OS. I want my   
    programs on the local system because the Web actually is rather   
    slow by comparison, esp when you are sharing a bookstore or   
    restaurant connection.   
      
    So, what is other's experience with this, and does anyone have   
    any recommendations on how to do this as easily as possible.   
      
    Oh and I have booted it to Puppy Linux, which does work, but I   
    also have the restore CD for this and would like, at least, to   
    have a working system for this.   
      
   BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn   
      
   ... It's never too late to have a happy childhood.   
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