Since I had some plans canceled yesterday, I decided I had enough time to re-shuffle my disks around, put the CF card first and install XP onto it and see what would happen.
As expected the install took a lot longer to complete that a standard disk. I wasn't really expecting 4-5 hours though.
It was when I got into Windows that my heart sank though. Trying to install the drivers for my system was extremely slow. Loading IE (which starts the driver installation) was slow. Trying to check out where the bottle-necks were was slow.
Basically the CF card was being hammered nearly all the time. I managed to move swap onto a real disk and "Program Files", but couldn't get my "Documents and Settings" reliably moved to another disk. I don't think it would have helped enough though.
So I timed a fresh boot from start up to shutdown on the CF card and it took nearly 8 minutes.
I re-installed onto a standard disk and did the same task in a minute.
It isn't a complete failure though. The animation during Windows XP was noticeably faster on the CF card compared to a standard disk. So there is hope for booting from CF. It was just everything after that that was slow.
My next task is to install *nix to CF and find out if it can be tweaked to boot with all haste.
