The Devs just all agreed on a description about the requirements for the new Users Manual (goes live in 2 weeks) that I thought might be useful to post here for melodie and others

Minimum

• A CD/DVD drive (and BIOS capable of booting from that drive), or a live USB (and BIOS capable of booting from USB)
• A modern i486 Intel or AMD processor
  512 MB of memory
• 5 GB free hard drive space
• A SoundBlaster, AC97 or HDA-compatible sound card.

Recommended

• A CD/DVD drive (and BIOS capable of booting from that drive), or a live USB (and BIOS capable of booting from USB)
• A modern i686 Intel or AMD processor
• 1 GB RAM or more
• At least 10 GB free hard drive space
• A 3D-capable video card for 3D desktop support

Yup, that sound right to me. I was able to load it onto my P IIIm/512mb Dell Inspiron 8100, and it ran reasonably well as long as I didn't ask too much of it at one time, but its not optimal performance wise, and would be more pleasant working on a faster machine with more memory.

On the dual processor/2gb Dell D620 it ran happily __{{emoticon}}__

You only need free HD space if you want to install. Running Live is a very viable option. Likewise, a frugal install can be done with less than 1 Gig free on any partition. You will probably want a few free Gig in order to do persistence and/or remastering. For example, a friend of mine has a Windows 7 laptop. She wanted to try Linux but she didn't want me to touch her hard drive so I made her a LiveUSB and altered the boot loader on the LiveUSB to dual boot Windows and MX.

I'm not insisting that you alter the specs, I'm just giving you the info so you can decide what to do. A couple of guys from Knoppix joined the MX forums because they thought we offered the best Linux LiveUSB they have ever seen. It could be a selling point. OTOH, too much tech info up front could be a turn off.

True, that is for installed. Thought that was what melodie was asking for.

Maybe just change the title to"minimun hard drive install" and"reccomended hard drive install" and add a 3rd section for"minimum live from cd/dvd or usb" so people know they can run it without devoting a drive to it if they like?