The LiveCD Forums

I've been using live CD's for a while now and I'm always frustrated by the sluggish behavior. I mean the time it takes from clicking on an app and then waiting for the CD drive to spin up before anything happens. I know Knoppix and some of it's derivatives have the "toram" cheat code but most of my computers can't fit a whole CD in ram. And fitting a DVD image in ram would obviously require several gig's.

Is there any alternative? Or is my ideal of having a live CD that acts and feels like a regular distro installed to HD just a dream?

-hb