Dear Snappy,
I dont know what got into your mind, but you might have had some troubles with a WinCE variant of the Slapper worm or something
.
One of my biggest complaints on laptops is the speed of the harddrive.
This is also one of the main plusses of a WindowsCE device as well. Instant boot, or in a laptops case, fast boot time.
I'm in the market for a new laptop, and besides a huge screen, and lowpower, high performance cpu
(and finaly one with a true 3d card
) my main focus is on a speedy harddisk.
I use a t20 IBM right now for programming, and I bought the fastest harddisk availiable for it
(1 month before the 7200rpms were launched that is
) its a 40gb TOSH 5400rpm with 16mb cache.
Look at it this way. Say your Jornada
(or whatever other device you might have
) had the capability to boot its WindowsCE os from a microdrive instead of from the rom, and I'm not talking about WBIC here, but for general purpose, would you do it?
If thats the case, I would consider trading in the device, and get a laptop.
Current microdrives do not even come close to the speed of a harddrive, and even that they use less power, imagine how long it would take to boot a 1.5 gb default install of WindowsXP. Let alone running applications from it.
Maybe due to the low power usage it might be possible to keep it in suspend instead of shutting down, but then I would bring up the stability of Windows-based operatingsystems in general.
General Purpose operating systems that actually get used, do require a regulair reboot, and if you would use a microdrive, I would recomend booting the laptop without the screen turned on, since that would nulify the power advantage you would gain.
However, if you are looking at a media solution, like a media extender device
(tivo/dvr like
) then combined with something like the low power VIA itx standard boards would be a nice solution.
However, I would still add a ram-drive for performance. I dont wanna wait 10 minutes before the device actually loaded the codec for playback of the file.
Also, with the current high speed processors, would it really matter that much if you would run
(estimated
) a 1 watt harddisk or a 5 watt harddisk?
Anyway, I'm kinda impatient, and would rather settle for a less speedier processor, which is only noticable in games and conversion stuff, then settle for a lower speed harddisk, which is used basicaly 99% of the time I'm using the device its plugged into.
BUT to answer your question, I also believe its possible to use a microdrive for an os.
There are motherboards that are capable of booting from pendrives, and if you use something like a cf-usb adapter, I'm pretty sure it will work. If you get a cf->ide adapter, you can even keep it all internal.
I forgot where I seen those, but it allows you to hookup a cf card directly to an IDE cable, and there might be even a 2.5" adapter for them as well. Otherwise just hook a laptop hd adapter to a cf-ide adapter and your ready to go.
When working, you dont have to let me know the boot times or the time how long it took you to install WindowsXP on it though.
Another option is to just install enough on there
(some linux or something
) to be able to run it as a terminal client, and then connect to a terminal server/citrix server/VNC server/X-server
If power consumption is your biggest issue, you might want to look into some mechanical attachement for generating energy to charge the battery. Or tap energy from your body.
Skippy has some additional details.
http://www.otherpower.com/hamster.html
... wonder if anyone tried running a notebook with a microdrive yet? Having talked on it at length on the other thread about using a CF card, I figured maybe the next best bet in terms of power consumption is to replace the hdd with a microdrive. 
... I like that link you sent ... *gosh* ... is there a labor law against that? 