TanZed,

I can't speak from experiance on the v3.4, I am currently still running v3.3, but, when I was running v3.3 off the CD, I used a DVD/CD drive, rated, I think, at 24x. It was slow, anytime I asked to do a program, like Frozen-Bubble, or fire off DiskFree, it did take a little time for the drive to spin-up, then access the drive, and finally, load and start the program.

How fast is the CD drive?

I can atest though, booting up was quick, surprisingly quick, considering it was all loading off of a 24x DVD drive. I think the boot-up time was comperable to what boot-up time I am getting having the system installed on the hard drive now. (probably due to the fact I have more things "auto-starting" on boot-up on the hard drive install [?])

Hopefully, this helps,
Ms. Cuddles