Hi. I have an HP tablet PC (no optical drive) that I'm thinking of reinstalling XP Tablet Edition. I do not have an enclosure for a DVD ROM drive so I was wondering if I could use my desktop DVD RW drive to help me install my software that can't be installed via virtual drive. An example of this would be Microsoft Streets and Trips which did not install through virtual drive, but requires an attached optical drive. I have a wireless router and I know how to share folders by networking the computers together (although the XP networking wizard has been hit or miss at times with me). Is it as easy as sharing the drive on the network (like sharing a folder) and should I do this with wired connection versus wireless connection? Is the installation reliable through this method? Is a USB external drive much more reliable? Thanks for the help.

Share it over the network the same you would with a hard drive or folder. Wired or wireless doesn't matter if its a one-off job every once in a while.
It probably won't install any faster but its a cheap solution that works.

Thanks for the reply. I just realized that I have a problem. Even if I were to use the network drive, how can I reinstall the Tablet OS without an external drive? If I use the network drive, the moment that the OS begins to reinstall, I will lose the network drive as the settings will no longer be functional. If the installation is common to the usual non-Tablet OS, the optical drive is needed throughout the installation process. Is there a way to do this without an optical drive?

It is possible to install from across the network, but it takes a bit of fiddling about.
http://www.netstumbler.org/f48/how-install...-network-12469/ might be of interest to you.