My 386 laptop HD is dead. The solution: an IDE to CF adapter

[John R.]

There's a subproject of the One Laptop Per Child project that is
creating a virtualized swap file with compressed swapped pages. Then
you could swap to a RAM filesystem. It would work well for
uncompressed data but obviously it wouldn't work well for jpgs, pngs,
etc.

The question would be how much precious RAM to dedicate as swap. Or
maybe you could swap to a network file system (slow, but might allow
some programs to run that otherwise would not run at all).

-- John.