Does the SD card show up as a 2nd drive? and other questions

Looking at getting a Acer one - 8 SSD 1gig linux. but I cant find one, but that beside the point.
I have a few questions.
Is the 2nd SD card slot worth getting this netbook over others?
Will the SD card in the expansion slot show up as a 2nd drive? or will I at least know where to saves files on it and not on the internal SSD?
Can you run apps off the expansion SD card? (not worried about slowing the programs down.)
Can you use different SD cards in the expansion drive? (you know one for photo editing one for games one for movies etc, I want to use fast SD cards that I already own.)
I can find the acer one with XP (same price) can i just load linux on top of xp and still get the fast boot time and have room on the SSD?

sorry if some of the questions have been asked b4. I did search 1st.

Thanks

 

Quick answers to your questions from my own experience; other users' mileage may differ:

1) The second card slot is an absolute boon. Among other things it means you can easily move your data between this machine and, say, your main desktop without going through any inbetween stages. If you decide to use eBoostr it makes an excellent, and fast, cache.
2) Yes the expansion slot card does show up as a second drive (at least under XP). Downside: XP won't recognise it as such for the Recycle Bin, so when you delete stuff from D, it's gone (though you could keep a recovery app on hand for emergencies).
3) Yes, many apps will run from the expansion slot, and in fact they are faster than off the Acer's rather snail-like SSD. All you have to do is point the install files to D when installing rather than C -- though of course the Windows files they depend on will still run from C (I'm not aware of anyone having successfully installed XP to the expansion card, though no doubt it is possible!)
4) Absolutely no problem swapping cards in the expansion slot. Hot-swapping possible too!
5) From my own experience I would ABSOLUTELY advise against trying to dual-boot between Linux and XP from the SSD. You really need all the space you can save on the SSD, and XP is slow enough already without burdening the drive with a second OS. Your call!

 

Good to know that I can change the SD card in the expansion slot and run programs off it with out any problems. and I guess I will just have to remove windows all together.

Thanks for the help.

 

2) You have to go to "recycling properties" and set the reserved space for SD card for recycling bin.
3) People have installed XP on the expansion card by booting to grub then to the SD card. The card readers are not usb based (that's a good thing because it doesn't consume a lot of CPU resource), it needs drivers operate.