installing software but no cd drive, help!

I bought this little tiny little lappy (windows 2000) which is too small to house a cd drive, but i need to install cd programs to it. i don't want to run out and buy an external usb cd player.
is there a way to use my other laptop (vista, with cd drive) to hardwire the 2 laptops together and install the programs through 1 computers cd drive to the other computer?

 

You could share the ressources on a network

 

all i have is a linksys srx200 router, is that what you're talking about?

I already have a 2gb usb thumbdrive that i send files back & forth, but i need to install programs like Office 2003, etc., where you need to install from the actual disc and not just a file.

 

I think if you copy all of the Office 2003 or whatever program you want to install files to the USB stick you should be able to install it from that... though this won't work for something like a clean install without some tweaking.

 

Yes, usually you can just copy the entire folder and install it on an other computer. If it's not the case, you can also build an ISO with the files and then create a virtual drive on the laptop without cdrom and mount the ISO there.

 

If both laptops are using the same router, just turn on Windows file sharing and share a drive on your Vista laptop. Then you can install programs from those drives.

If there's a problem with this, then connect the two computers with an ethernet cable. In XP, you can create a peer-to-peer network by going into the network connections control panel and using the Add New Connection wizard. I don't know about Windows 2000, but I assume there's some way to do this there too.

 

I'd try in this order : (1) classical copy/install of the files with the usb key, (2) share the drive (in a network) as described by Swarmer, (3) use a virtual drive like I said previously

 

Yeah, most CD burning programs are able to rip a CD to a .iso image file, then you could mount it onto a virtual drive with Daemon Tools or a similar program.

 

That actually brings up a good question.... if you try to install an external CD/DVD player..... will the computer ask you to insert the drivers CD in the unistalled cd unit?

 

I suspect that Windows' native drivers would be good enough to recognize the drive and at least read a CD or DVD... although I'm not certain about that. In any case, I don't remember needing any drivers for my external USB hard drive.