Monday, April 18, 2011

Installing CD/DVD Applications on a Netbook or Windows based Tablet

Note: This procedure is general enough so it can be used for installing any version of software that doesn't incorporate some type of anti-piracy mechanism that comes on an optical disk (e.g. CD or DVD) to a netbook computer or Windows based tablet.

Recently I had to install a legally licensed copy of Microsoft Office that was on a DVD to a netbook computer.  My netbook had no optical drive, so I assumed that I could copy the files to a flash drive and perform the install from there.  Well thats the problem with assuming, it doesn't work most of the time.

If I had bought Office from the Microsoft store I could have downloaded it from there, entered my product key and been fine.  Unfortunately all I had was a store bought DVD version of the software.

Here is what I did, on my desktop computer which has an optical drive.  I right-clicked on the optical drive with the Microsoft Office DVD in it, and shared the drive on my network.  Make sure to note the name of the share (it could like \\computer_name\drive_letter, e.g. \\fred-pc\d).  Grant EVERYONE read access under the Permission button.  Make sure the network profile on the computer sharing the drive was set to Home under the Network and Sharing Center control panel.

On the netbook computer connect to the desktop via its IP address (e.g. \\192.168.0.52\d) because the machine name (e.g. \\fred-pc\d) didn't resolve.  It might ask you to authenticate, so enter the username (e.g. 192.168.0.52\fred or fred-pc\fred) and password.

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