help with W8 appreciated

[devonwoody]

A neighbour who purchased a new laptop this year with W8 does not have a dvd drive and cannot install her programs.

She brought it over to my W7 together with a mobile hard drive and I attempted to get the program (Microsoft greetings cards) to load to her mbh but I could not get my w7 to transfer.

Is there a way, and would the program work?

 

[misterfish]

Most things will work with W8

As a DVD holds a large amount of data the W8 laptop either needs to access the DVD content directly. In this case the easiest solution is to purchase an external USB drive and plug it directly in to the laptop. If the DVD doesn't contain too much data it could be copied in its entirity to a USB memory stick plugged in to your computer which could then be plugged into the new laptop and the program installed from the memory stick.

Another possibility is to find if the program is available to download from the manufacturer and if so download directly to the notebook.

Misterfish

 

[mseries]

Misterfish makes a good point. DVDs are 4.7GB, and you can get USB sticks as big as that so there is one option, however if you don't know what program to run to install the application you might be stumped. The DVD will have an autorun to automatically launch the installer when the disc is detected in the drive, you need to locate this and try to work out what it started. As well as transfer by USB stick you could zip up the contents of the DVD on your computer (no need to install it on your computer, just cancel the install) and transfer it by some other means such as email if it's not too large or via dropbox/google drive etc. Then manually launch the installer. In zipping you can probably create smaller chunks and reassemble them at the other end.

It's one of those tasks that is easier to do than explain how to do because without seeing the DVD it's hard to say what we are working with.

 

[MMUK]

You can pick up an external DVD drive from CPC for about £25

 

[petermillard]

You can pick up an external DVD drive from CPC for about £25

Or a basic one from Amazon for a tenner...

 

[mseries]

an external dvd drive is probably the easiest method. What was the mobile drive that your neighbour fetched over ? Maybe if that did not work it's because that device isn't configured properly. Can you see the contents of the disc on the W8 machine using this drive ? If so look for the autorun file or maybe right click on the dvd drive and execute autorun

 

[devonwoody]

The lady is going to purchase a cd/dvd usb drive for use with her W8 so hopefully that will work for her.

 

[Lons]

As an aside, this ( eBay item number: 350715126698 ) is a useful bit of kit if you have any old internal HDDs around. Dead easy to use and quicker than a caddy.

Bob