I used the 8.0 or 8.1 eval CD for a bit before buying 8.1 (and recently 8.2). It worked really well for me (on my old system - a 450MHz AMD K7 something). It *mainly* runs off the CD but needs about 100MB of HD space on your Windows disk to save the home directory and any config stuff it needs (which saves re-configuring your hardware each time). This 100MB exists as a single file as far as Windows is concerned.
Thanks for the info. What if the host box is running Linux - SuSE or otherwise...? Or is the evaluation disk a Windows-machine only evaluation? -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003