can this be done...load entire os, files to a virtual drive or usb drive....

here's an idea, someone tell me if it'll work....and how....

now that memory has gotten so cheap, would it be possible to put 4gb of memory in a system, set up the hard drive with xp or something, then make a virtual drive in ram or make a cd that would load a virtual drive on startup and have it load the os to the memory and have a computer you could use to surf the internet and have no hard drive at all....

you could even load word probably...i realize you'd be hosed if you lost power....

or what about loading and entire system on to a 2gb usb thumb drive and running it from there......then you could take the system with you for security when you left......

i am sure there is tons of stuff on this so someone point me to it or show me the way.......thoughts?

Check out "Linspire" or "Knoppix". They are versions of Linux. They run from a CD. Require no hard drive install.

You can Google for download sites.

You can do that with a chopped down version of XP using Barts PE Builder. The PE builder is a utility that will let you create a bootable xp environment- along with "plugins" for different apps. I built one for my teenage niece's. It boots the XP environment, uses DHCP to connect network, and autolaunches firefox. I have Firefox setup with a toolbar that has links to AIM,ICQ, and yahoo web interfaces - so they can IM without installing any software. It also has wordpad for typing stuff up. Obviously, the perk here is that I don't have to go to my sisters house to remove spyware, etc.. every week anymore. Actually- the whole house uses the cd to browse the internet - since my sister uses a web based email.
I made one that has all my favorite utilities (Ghost,Partition Magic,GetDataBack,Mcafee,Stinger,ERD Commander,WinRar,etcc. that I use as a troubleshooting disk- Also - after you have your CD tweaked out- you can copy the files to a USB thumbdrive and boot from that ( if the PC BIOS supports booting usb devices)
Check it out...

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

here a example using knopix that was posted this week.
http://www.metropipe.net/ProductsPVPM.shtml

its slow at booting but all you have to do is click the Bat file on the thumb drive and you have your portable OS.

First off loading an OS from a USB drive is possible (I've done it), but it's slow as all hell...unless some of these newer faster transfer devices help, I would think this is still too far off to be any good.

I regards to loading an OS into RAM or RAMDisk, that is possible as well. However, it's not quite that simple...first off I don't think you can do it with a standard OS you can buy off the shelf. The one time I did this I was using BartPE, which was already mentioned. Basically you get BartPE all setup, then you go to this post:

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10806

And read and read...essentially what is happening is the new Windows 2003 bootloader has a function to load an iso image into RAM and boot from it...so you are essentially loading an iso image directly into RAM before anything starts (Thanx to the new 2003 bootloader) and then the actual iso is booted. So first off you have to wait for the image to be transfered, which from a USB drive is about a few minutes. Then the other thing you have to keep in mind is that even though RAM is writeable, the image file you loaded is not. So keep data in mind...you already seem to know that though.

Sadly, the functions of BartPE are not really preformance based, so the system really doesn't look to gain anything from loading from the RAM...