Installing things from CD when you have no CD drive

[Zak33]

Lo dudes

Sair wants a laptop, and I think a mini job is the best solution, (previous thread in SFF forum) cos of how it needs to me moved, transported etc.

But how would one go about installing, say OFFICE, if the laptop had no CD drive?
(USB cd drives seems a lot of dough)

Can I do it across a network by sharing the CD drive of a PC?

[Mossy]

just install over the network, right click optical drive on desktop share on network and install across your network

[0iD]

Either that or create an iso image of whatever & store that on a network/shared drive.

[Zak33]

cool....will trial it on my PC from Sair's right now

[Flibb]

you can instal from the network or these http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/USB-2-0-TO-SAT...1%7C240%3A1318

are excellent, and handy to have anyway. Just pull a cd/dvd from a desktop case.

[Zak33]

OK, network was superb

cheers muchly chaps

[Mossy]

great Glad you got it sorted

[Zak33]

I have'nt purcased it (from you guys) yet Paul

Just making sure i know what I'm getting myself into kinda thing

[Lee H]

See, it's always the simplest solution that solves the problem

people seem to forget you can share optical drives just like hard-drives on networks.

[Mossy]

Let me know on purchase ZAK I will help you as much as I can to make the correct decision.

[aidanjt]

Generally, dumping ISO images onto a network share is usually the best solution, it saves a lot of walking around to change discs, it's faster, and concurrent installs work a lot better.

[hyenus]

i bought a compaq tc1100 tablet pc sans operating system installed/cd dock ... and spent a good few days playing around until finally building a usb stick install of xp tablet pc which worked flawlessly ... would i do it again .. NO ... i would buy a ten quid usb to ide bridge and use an old internal cdrom ;-)