Hi All,
 
   Ed Anderson <eanderson@carolina.rr.com> wrote:
 
> Boy, now here is an example of what kind of information we have access to on
> this list.  Now that Ernest mentions it, yeah, I recall that the heads of
> the hard disk float on a cushion of air - but, I would never have thought to
> associate altitude with hard drive crashes!  Thanks Ernest.
>

   Indeed, if you want to run your computer at high altitude,
you pretty much have two options: pressurization or solid-
state storage.  That's why the hand-helds, e.g. Palm and
iPAQ, are so widely used in homebrew avionics applications.  

   Solid-state disks became a technical darling in the early
nineties, after a big jump in memory / price ratio.  One of
the popular solutions for laptop-sized units is the USB memory.  Many current-production notebooks offer the ability
to boot from a USB device.  The main limitation is the size
of the OS, which for "Win-tel" systems can eat up most of
a 512MB "memory stick".  The all-but-obvious solution is to
flash to OS into ROM just like the handhelds do.  

   Here are some links that may shed some light on a solution or two:

http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=129777&KEYWORD=Texas%20Memory%20Systems

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/solid-state/

http://www.industrialpc.com/flash.htm

Regards,
Dale R.
COZY MkIV-R13B #1254