Hi, This may be obvious to some but it wasn't to me so I thought that I would pass it along just in case it helps someone else. I have an old laptop that is having issues trying to run any recent LiveCD (Dell Latitude 700MHz with 128 MB RAM) because it does not meet the minimum recommended system requirements. This makes it kind of difficult to use some of the more recent utilities contained on those CDs for data recovery, forensics, troubleshooting, etc. where you don't want to put a swap partition on the built-in drive. I also have a bunch of redundant 256 MB USB thumb drives which sit unused since multi-gig sticks are cheap as dirt now. I was able to get the old laptop to run the recent LiveCDs by formatting the thumb drive as a linux swap partition and using it during boot. Recent LiveCDs will recognize and use the swap partition on the USB stick and allow you to completely load the desktop. It is not a quick boot ... but it might make the difference between working and not. I would certainly recommend a LiveCD that uses XFCE by default. There are many other ways of doing this but this is a simple one that keeps two things out of the dumpster. /Mike
