New computer has no optical drive, how to load Office 2003

MitchF150 wrote:
What laptop does not come standard with a writeable DVD drive?? Are you getting a 'tablet' for your wife?? Those do not have drives and only USB ports and some don't even have those...

Many laptops, especially the Netbook style, do not have an optical drive. In nearly all cases this is not an issue and allows for substantially smaller, lighter laptop computers. How many times do you use/need your optical drive? If you answer truthfully, you will understand why a built-in optical drive is really not necessary about 99% of the time. Paying a few extra bucks for a USB drive still leaves you hundreds of dollars ahead of the game.

MitchF150 wrote:
What laptop does not come standard with a writeable DVD drive??

Netbooks, or a presumably cheap laptop.

2003 is the oldest version that will work on windows 8.

Copy it to a USB stick, USB hard drive, SD card or share a DVD drive on the network. All will work, unless none of your PC have a DVD then you will need to get one.

X2 on a USB external optical drive. I have office 2000 running on my Windows 7 laptop. :)

What laptop does not come standard with a writeable DVD drive?? Are you getting a 'tablet' for your wife?? Those do not have drives and only USB ports and some don't even have those...

rk911 wrote:

Thunder Mountain wrote:
Buying the wife a new laptop coming in a couple of weeks. Seems the newest ones don't have an optical drive. She uses Office 2003 for a few things and would like to have it on her new computer. Not work spending the $ for a new version of Office.

Have a legal copy of Office 2003 with install key. Can I copy the disk to my external hard drive and click on an exe file to install from the external drive?

get thee to any place that sells computer accessories and purchase a USB optical drive. $40-$90 depending. it's likely to be useful in the future.

Shoot, got this answer posted before I could! I bought the USB optical drive for my wife's Netbook and we have used it several times for different pieces of software. Even if it can be done by installing on one and then transferring to another, why bother when there's a simple and cheap solution available?

Thunder Mountain wrote:
Buying the wife a new laptop coming in a couple of weeks. Seems the newest ones don't have an optical drive. She uses Office 2003 for a few things and would like to have it on her new computer. Not work spending the $ for a new version of Office.

Have a legal copy of Office 2003 with install key. Can I copy the disk to my external hard drive and click on an exe file to install from the external drive?

get thee to any place that sells computer accessories and purchase a USB optical drive. $40-$90 depending. it's likely to be useful in the future.

Or download and install Libre Office. It's free and full featured. It will work just fine with all your Office docs.

As Gdetrailer said, you could use one of the free office suites. I use Libre Office. Just download the install file.