At 09:35 AM 12/27/2000 Errol Lishman wrote: > >I have given my son my old Compaq Contura 430CX laptop which is an Intel 486 >with 8 meg ram running Windows for Workgroups V3.11 / DOS 6.22. > >My question is this, as most software is on CD these days, and this machine >does not have a CD drive, how can I connect a CD drive to this machine. I >can't afford an external drive right now so I was hoping I can cable-link my >works laptop to this machine and install software this way. My works laptop >is a Compaq Presario 1920 PII running Windows 2000 Pro. Errol: You have several options. You could: - get a null modem cable and use transfer software such as LapLink or Fastlink. Put the software on boot diskettes for each PC, and do a clean boot. - install a network device and make a network connection - use a modem on the laptop and transfer - borrow external parallel port removable media drive such as a a zip or jaz drive; or a parallel to SCSI external CDROM drive The WFW 3.11 era software used mostly diskettes for installation. An i486 with 8MB of RAM on a laptop hard drive is not an ideal platform to run any software which needs a CDROM for installation. Good luck. John Chin Visit our website regularly for FAQs, articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org