When travelling I like to use a live CD with my laptop to do any banking if necessary - the laptop otherwise still runs on Win 7 I burnt a Mint 17 CD a few months ago and it worked fine when testing on a pc. I just put it into my laptop and while it works, I noticed two issues and wonder if these are normal. a) Boot-up time is very slow - did not use a timer but must have been around 5 minutes until the system was ready b) the drive was extremely noisy with lots of spinning going on. Also, is there any strong need to do a later version of 17.1 due to security issues or can I just stick with the CD I got?
This may be completely off base, but I had problems sounding like that recently and thought the drive was going bad, but one day I pulled the tray out and cleaned the heads and other mechanisms, and all of a sudden, the drive was like new again, and everything was fine. Might be the case in your situation also.
How much RAM do the laptop and desktop have, respectively? If there's not enough RAM to fully hold the uncompressed image from the LiveCD, stuff from the LiveCD will get load as needed. There may also be a need for some complicated sorting out during bootup.
Mirimir - I don't think Ram is the issue. The laptop has 8 gb ram , 2 more than the pc. I might just notice the noise or spinning more as my ear is closer to the drive - anyway, it is working. I did a new version for 17.1 but the effect is the same. Last time I used a live cd like this is two years ago, so maybe the current versions are just larger and thus take longer to load?
Larger, well, yes. But more like humongous memory hogs Try Debian 7.7 with classic Gnome <https://www.debian.org/CD/live/>.
