Install program cd rom

Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! My new laptop does not have a CD drive. I have some programs on CDs such as Office 97 and Access 97, which I want to run or update from on my new machine. Can I so to speak squeeze them through a USB? In this excerpt from Answercast 90 I look at the possibility of transferring contents of a CD to a USB drive in order to install a program. Well, the good news is that many programs that come on CD will actually install just fine if you simply copy the contents of the CD, the entire contents of the CD, to a USB drive.

I typically recommend that you do so to an empty USB drive so that it looks as much as possible like the CD — except that it happens to be a USB flash drive. After it appears in Windows Explorer you can then navigate to the root of that drive and run what would, presumably, be a set up program or something like it.

There are ways around it — but for the most part, most programs that are delivered on CD can usually be installed by simply copying the contents of the entire CD to a USB drive and then installing from the USB drive instead.

End of Answercast 90 Back to — Audio Segment. Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week. The other option is to simply get an external USB drive. Look for a setup application in the root folder to launch the installation CD browser or alternatively, navigate to the sub-folder for your software to directly install the software without the benefit of the installation CD browser. Note: The setup program may not display the extension "exe" - to identify which is the correct file, look for "application" in the file type column when making your selection.

Double click on the setup program to start the program installation. On some operating systems, you may need to right-click the application and choose "Run as Administrator" from the pop-up context menu.

The installation CD browser should now open and you should proceed with your installation as instructed in your user's guide. You can do likewise with Microsoft Office: just download the trial version that matches the version you already own, then activate it using your product key. This gets a little trickier with older versions of Office, as Microsoft currently offers only the edition for download.

You might need to hit up some torrent sites to find older trials. This method should work for the vast majority of other software as well. Usually you can download a trial or demo version and then unlock it with your license key.