Using the Optical Drive on a Desktop via Laptop

[Pelagodromo]

Hello,

I have a Laptop with no optical drive. I wanted to avoid buying and external CD/DVD Burner by connecting the Laptop to the Desktop in order to use the optical drive to setup up office and MSWindows. Is this at at all possible? How do I do this?

 

[Saga Lout]

Hello and welcome to Hardware Forums.

Installing Office to a network drive with an existing system on it will be simple enough but installing an Operating System to a blank disk is another matter. If you took the hard disk from the laptop and slaved it to the PC it could be done but the converter to do that would cost more than an external drive.

Externals are only £20 in the UK so that makes them worth about ten dollars US if price differences follow their normal path. It will make things easier in the future if the system breaks down or just for installing new software so it's a good investment

 

[steimy]

I would agree, my HP laptop doesn't have a CD/DVD drive either which was something new to me as my Dell does. In order to install any programs i wanted i used my 8GB flash drive for the smaller stuff, anything bigger it would just be so easy to use an external hard drive plugged up via USB. The files can be put on the external drive from the main PC and then just install to the laptop from there. You can get a large external drive for $50 or under, They also have external DVD drives that hook up via USB for about $30 if you really needed to use it to burn discs from the laptop:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Lite+On+-+22x+Internal+DVD%B1RW/CD-RW+Drive/1450274.p?id=1218259759497&skuId=1450274

Plus an external HDD is very handy for backing up all of your setup files for your programs for both systems. This way if either one would happen to have the HDD crash (which i have personally had happen) you have all of the set up files for all the programs you use right on the external and won't have to go searching and downloading them all again.

 

[Saga Lout]

My bad for not being clear enough - I was referring to an external CD/DVD ROM when I priced it as £20 GBP.