The eSata standard might be able to do this without the bandwidth lag. 3 times faster than FireWire 800, at least in throughput.
You *can* boot off an external drive, but IANAL. But yes, we would have to move beyond the contemporary driver model into something where you have "universal" drivers or something akin to a virtual HAL that parses out the hardware into a useful format. Maybe there is an acceptable tradeoff between performance and portability. > -----Original Message----- > I'd love to be able to do this with today's external hard drives, just > plugging into the USB (or FireWire) port. The reason you can't do this > is because of Microsoft's policy. They would lose a lot of sales of > the OS if what you advocate above would work. The real reason for the > Registry is copy prevention. For those applications that don't require > registry entries to run, you can run the app from an external drive > just fine. My Eudora mail client is a prime example. I suspect you > can boot from an external hard drive with modern motherboards, although > I haven't tried it. Of course, to move around, you have to have > drivers loaded for all the hardware (or at least the video cards) you > will encounter wherever you may plug in your portable hard drive. ************************************************************************ * ==> QUICK LIST-COMMAND REFERENCE - Put the following commands in <== * ==> the body of an email & send 'em to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <== * Join the list: SUBSCRIBE COMPUTERGUYS-L Your Name * Too much mail? Try Daily Digests command: SET COMPUTERGUYS-L DIGEST * Tired of the List? Unsubscribe command: SIGNOFF COMPUTERGUYS-L * New address? From OLD address send: CHANGE COMPUTERGUYS-L YourNewAddress * Need more help? Send mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ************************************************************************ * List archive at www.mail-archive.com/computerguys-l@listserv.aol.com/ * RSS at www.mail-archive.com/computerguys-l@listserv.aol.com/maillist.xml * Messages bearing the header "X-No-Archive: yes" will not be archived ************************************************************************
