Desktop - laptop CD drive

[dunullbee]

Hi. I have recently acquired a brand new Dell X300 laptop (so you can guess that now I'm a bit skint!). The laptop does not have a CD drive & I currently can't afford to buy one. I have a desktop PC which has a CD drive. Is it somehow possible to use my desktop CD drive to install software onto my laptop (using cables where required).?

[vehelpfulguy]

You could connect your desktop PC and your laptop together as a small network.

You would need a network interface card (NIC) in your PC, your laptop probably already has one. You could then connect them together with an ethernet cable.

You could then 'share' your CD drive in your desktop PC and your laptop could use it as an external resource.

You could then put a CD in the CD drive of the desktop PC, and run it from the laptop. 

If you look on the web you should be able to find a few websites about this.

To be honest I have never actually done this, but I think it may be called Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) in Windows and you will need a crossover ethernet cable. 

[Ralph]

What vehelpfulguy says is virtually bang on correct. You don't need to use Internet Connection Sharing, the laptop will show somewhere within Network Neighborhood on the desktop, which appears near the bottom of the tree in Windows Explorer. This method does work, but is quite slow. If you need a ethernet card for your desktop, they're around �10 with a short crossover network cable costing around the same (probably cheaper on ebay). If you need an ethernet card for the PC, that could get quite pricey, please read on for an alternative.

The other option (although it involves spending some cash) is to buy a 1GB USB flash drive which will cost around �40-50. You can then copy the CD to the flash drive on the desktop PC, then copy it back to the disk of the laptop, install by double-clicking setup.exe or similar, then deleting the copied CD when all is installed and well. The USB flash drive will prove to be useful for day to day stuff as well, so will be money well spent, if you can find it!

[dunullbee]

vehelpfulguy & Ralph.

Thanks v much for your advice. I tried the home network setup approach and it worked a treat. Only problem was trying to install games onto the laptop from the desktop. The installation kept on crashing, don't know why, just kept on receiving those "Microsoft has encountered a problem....etc".