Since I found out that Windows tries several paths to load DLL's when any application is loaded (tool used: process explorer from www.sysinternals.com), I'm going to move most of the system DLL's to a pcmcia flash drive. The system should boot FASTER and also run faster.

After having started first experiments, I'm not successful until now. There seems to be no possibility to explicitly specify a "first seek" path, in this case e:\windows\system.
When windows does perform automatic path seeking, it seeks (e.g) first in the application directory, then the DESKTOP directory and then the system directory.

Anybody having an idea? Probably I should use a sort of technique of mapping a directory from the flash drive into a corresponding C:\drive directory (when such is possible), or even specify the flash drive as a sort of cache extension.
(Note: target is Windows 98 )you may also have to take in account as well the ram and cpu...to make it run faster and load faster.
And what PROCESSES are being loaded?
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faster booting and performance
...i should have imagined that m$oft thought of this when it produced windows?RAM, CPU? To my opinion these factors are not crucial in today's computer performance. Most standard apps and business apps run smoothly when the CPU is quite "old" (in this case 266 MHz/96 MB RAM). Only games and image apps need more capacity today.

But startup times of apps is quite slow. Here state of the art computers have an advantage. But alas, not so dramatically, since the hard disk must move increasingly frequently forth and back from SECTOR to sector. This permanent moving is gone worse as programs got bigger. Program startups require a mix of resources, e.g. own dll's and windows dll's from the system directory. Having only the most frequent windows resources copied to flash would help substantially.
Of course, a big disk cache (i.e. RAM) would help, however not as good as a permanent fast access resource.