We bought a little baby computer for leisure travel. It's an Acer Aspire and doesn't have a DVD drive. It comes with a trial version of Office Home and Student 2007. When we bought a new PC in 2006, I bought Office Student/Teacher 2003 from Costco. It was good for three installs. Is there any way to get that 2003 version on the Acer? A cheap way, that is?

I've heard of external drives but don't know where to start...I still use my VCR and rarely turn on my cell phone, so I'm obviously not familiar with all the newest electronics.

Thanks.

One way to do it is to utilize a wireless (or wired) network to "borrow" the CD/DVD drive of another machine.

First, check to make sure that your netbook meets the Office 2003 system requirements. If you still have the original packaging, the requirements are listed on the base of the box.

On your desktop which has the CD/DVD drive, share the entire CD/DVD drive. You may be prompted to also change firewall settings.

Next, map the shared drive as a network drive on the netbook. This will effectively turn the CD/DVD drive on the desktop into a drive accessible from the netbook.

On the desktop, hold down the SHIFT key as you insert the Office 2003 disc. You should now be able to run the setup program from the netbook. Please note that the installer will take MUCH LONGER than usual, since everything is being relayed over your home network.

Another way to do this would be to buy a 2 or 4 gig flash drive, plug it into the computer with the cd drive, and copy the contents of the CD to the flash drive, then plug it into the new laptop and install.


chris