I have installed DSL on a 64 Gb USB. I have found the the boot time is about 10 Minutes on my SONY VAIO VGN SR-290J. Same USB of DSL boots up within minutes on my HP 245 G6 laptop.
That much of difference is there, in boot time.
After initial boot the speed is pretty fast on both the laptops.
can confirm - eeepc 701 booting from the liveUSB was very slow
for booting to OS - from grub to login screen was ~75 seconds.
Apparently there were three models of the EEE PC 701. One has 512 MB of RAM, and none has more than 1 GB out of the box. All have a single-thread Celeron M 900 MHz processor,, which is even slower than an AMD C-30, and for some models it's clocked at 630 MHz. All have USB 2.0, of course. One the other hand, all have a SSD, which surprises me.
75 seconds seem reasonable, under those circumstances. How fast did it boot using its native OS?
I suspect the slow boot from USB is a result of the slow USB 1.x connection, ram and CPU limitation. We can't do much about the USB speed, but I think it *may* be possible to speed up the boot process from USB on these old netbooks by using an less compressed ISO. DSL is using zx compression to squeeze all the included applications and drivers into 700MB. I could set up a special ISO that is larger (less compressed) and it should take less cycles to boot. This wouldn't have any change on boot time once installed, but should be an improvement for people who want to boot off of USB.
If you all want to experiment with me I'll set up a temporary download and you could report back your findings.