[KLB]

I just bought a used Mini 9 (It is the 8 GB model and came with all the disks) for my wife to use and decided to do a re-install of the OS.

I formated the drive and did the XP clean install from an old external CD drive I had laying around and when I went to install the drivers I discovered it was a DVD, not a CD. I don't have an external DVD drive. Yeah, I know-- I should have looked first.

Is there some way I could use the drive in my PC laptop?

I looked at the guide here for drivers and I downloaded them to a thumb drive and am in the middle of installing them.

My question becomes: what am I missing?

I really want to keep the system pared down as much as possible and install Open Office on it for her rather then the Works version that came with but I'm not sure what I'm missing.

Thanks in advance!

[rrfranczak3]

the drivers should be it....you will find out if you are missing any, you can always go into device manager and look for any yellow exclamiation items that will tell you what is not installed

[lswartz]

Do you have a home network? If you do, you can just share the DVD on your laptop with your Mini. Although, you may not have the drivers to do that. Maybe you can get them on line if you Ethernet connection works. It has been a while since I done much in Win XP.

Since you are installing Open Office, have you considered Ubuntu 10.04 for the netbook? It comes with Open Office & I only had to install 2 items, my wireless driver (via Ethernet cable) & Adobe Flash. My wife hasn't had a problem using it. I wish she did. Every time I want to use it, she is on it.