OK, in my zest for the wow factor, the thought of a pen drive running a PC is way up there.

And for those technicallly inclined (aka geek), yep, it's got wow factor in droves. 

Isn't there always a "but"?  Seriously, I gave two folks one  of these a couple of weeks back, and one group of IM guys is just singing the Linux praise.  

But the newbie I "introduced" to this, professed, "I just can't get it to run!"

Surely this was impossible, I knew his PC was less than a year old.  So I made a house call.  Fair enough, he made one, also.  He's a dentist, so if he can venture outside the office...

Long and short of it, sure, the pen drive (USB Drive) worked just fine, as delivered.  But going into the BIOS setup to trigger the system to allow the USB device boot is not overly "normal", nor what i would recommend for most users.  SO in this behalf, I now recognize the beauty of the Live CD over pen drive delivery.  

Just an aside, I have read many times regarding setup of your own pen drive.  The drive needs to be partitioned to boot.  Most do not come delivered from the manufacturer supporting this, so you need to alter this to actually be able to run a  pen drive, successfully.  My other blog entry about building a boot drive from Windows works well, I am fairly certain machiner already wrote a how-to for the pen drive in Debian.

ezsurfer