External CD Drive Compatibility

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Hello, I was wonering if anyone could help me with this:
I recently aquired an old laptop, IBM Thinkpad 560Z 96Mb RAM PentiumII.
Its getting on and not up to much but it was free and if I can get MS office onto it will suite my needs for the moment. My problem is that it doesn't have a CD drive so i can't install anything fro cd, the machine has a PC slot with card that runs a floppy dive that came with it, could I install office using this instead? It also has a USB port.
Ideally though a cd drive would be best so I could install other stuff. I was after some advice as to what external cd drive might be compatible, i've seen some on ebay for <£20 but i don't know if they will work. Any advice appreciated, Thanks.
 

Quadophile

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griffin said:
I was after some advice as to what external cd drive might be compatible, i've seen some on ebay for <£20 but i don't know if they will work. Any advice appreciated, Thanks.
Any external USB drive would be OK but you must understand that the newer drives are likely to have USB 2.0 instead of USB 1.1 which would slow things down for you (although will be fully functional) but that should not affect you installing the software. You should actually consider a newer drive which can be used again when you have an upgraded PC which will probably have a USB2.0 port. A USB 1.1 cd writer will also be OK but not future-proof.

For your information

USB 1.1 = 12 Mbps
USB 2.0 = 480 Mbps

Some of the brands for you to consider:

Lite on
Pioneer
TDK
Plextor (expensive but one of the top brands in burners and my first choice)
NEC

I have not come across any CD/DVD writers that work with PCMCIA slot though I have used it on a Sony laptop but it was not a writer, just a CD-Rom.
 

muckshifter

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Any USB device should/will be compatable ... providing you are using Win98 or above OS.

;)
 
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i was just thinking about the o/s on that laptop, what version of windows is it running?

the last o/s that installed from floppies was windows 3.1.
 

floppybootstomp

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Techy said:
the last o/s that installed from floppies was windows 3.1.
Not so. I had an early version of Win 98 on floppies, they came bundled with Dell systems & similar.
 

floppybootstomp

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christopherpostill said:
haha... how many floppys floppy?

20? 30?
hehe ;)

Can't remember, but it was less than MS Office on floppies, that used to take forever to load.

I couldn't give 'em away in the end, funnily enough, I think I ended up giving them to a charity shop.
 

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