I personally feel that live CD would be the way to go, but keep in mind that your CD-Rom drive will be unavailable when running the Knoppix live CD. You can get more information and download Knoppix from severial different mirrors at this link:
http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
It is also a good idea to burn Knoppix to a CD-RW disk, so you will not have to toss away a CD-R disk each time a new version is introduced.