Turning a dead laptop into a snappy workstation with sidux

I have a dell C610 laptop with a dead hard drive and 512MB memory. It had been collecting dust for a while and I felt that I could use it as a work station. On the other hand, I do not feel like investing in a new hard drive.

First, I tried live cd. The problem is that I could not persist my changes. Then I found ubuntu remastersys, which allows me to burn a cd that representing my running system. For storage, I had to use a usb hard disk, although with usb 1.1 it is a bit slow. Accessing files on the cd is alos a bit slow. Another thing that bothered me is that the dvd/cdrw drive was busy and could not be used for anything else, such as burning another live cd.

Then I tried to find a livecd with toram option. Most of them require more than 512MB. Some required less but did not work quite write or had peculiar formats. Finall, I found sidux, which needs about 450MB. Almost perfect, because programs run all from RAM with lightening speed, and the dvd/cdrw drive is now free. Being based on debian, I can install any debian packages to extend my system as I see fit.

One problem remains, however. As I added programs, eventually the memory ran out and kernel started killing them (OOM, or out of memory kills). This is not good. I then connected a usb drive and create a swap partition on it. The usb drive is also used for persistent storage. Perfect!

Finally I have a speedy workstation with a nice desktop that is practically free but works just as good as a system costs hundreds of dollors, thanks to linux, especially sidux. I expect to use it until something else fails.