The compressed tarball of the VM is about 3 GB, with OpenOffice, Java 2EE SDK, Mono 2.4, Office 2003, R etc installed. I have not tried to install the latest SP, as Windows then sets aside lots of voluminous files for backup. About 2GB of the 4GB Knoppix image file is in use now. A 16 GB stick with a 6GB FAT32 and a 10 GB ext3 partition holds Knoppix and a few compressed virtual machines, in addition to some software packs.

To me, it seems that the more lightweight LXDE manager really helps, too. I'm using a 4 1/2 yr old Inspiron 510m w/2GB RAM and a 250 GB ATA drive, and things could have been swifter, but I had expected Win XP to run much more slowly in this setup. For me. there isn't really any great need for running on a faster machine. And Knoppix 6.0.1 runs the old Intel wireless card in the machine flawlessly!

I also use a cheap and slow Kingston DataTraveler pendrive, but in practical use, it's fast enough for me. All repeated volume reading and writing happens to and from the harddisk.