New laptop came with DVD installation disk but no DVD drive. Advice?

It’s a kind of cruel joke. What they’ll want you to do now is buy the external DVD drive.

If you have access to another PC you could clone the DVD to a bootable USB flash drive. I would assume the laptop supports booting from USB.

Kind of a dick move though. Call them and see if they will send you a USB version or offer Windows 7 for download (I doubt it though),

The good news is you can get get a external one for $30 bucks.

Or you could use another PC to image the install disk on a external hard drive and install from there. Surely you have a external drive to make back-ups. Well, if you don’t you should since they are so damn cheap and data loss sucks.

Answer to your question yes you can install 7 if you have the dvd for it, you will however need to use someones computer with a dvd drive and also have a 4–8gb usb stick for this.

First you download this tool from MS
http://images2.store.microsoft.com/prod/clustera/framework/w7udt/1.0/en-us/Windows7-USB-DVD-tool.exe

This tool takes only 1 or 2 clicks its very simple you don’t need to know anything about computers to use it, basically it will transfer your 7 dvd to a usb stick in such a way that when you start your new netbook it will begin to install 7 as if you had a cd drive, and faster too!

Install this program on another computer that has a dvd drive.

Insert the 7 dvd you have into this computer (don’t run or install the disk!)

Start the program you downloaded and follow the very easy instructions, then wait for it to copy the files, takes a few mins…

Pop the usb stick into your netbook, your netbook should ‘boot’ it and begin the process of installing 7…

if not press (F2 normally) at the start up screen the moment your netbook turns on, goto boot, then set usb to 1st)

Done! Let me know if you need any help…

You’re probably going to want a DVD drive for something so i say spend the $30.

Actually, I’ve not missed optical media on my netbook at all – there are tools available to mount .iso files within both Windows and Linux OSes, and in two years of ownership, I’ve never had a “damn, I wish I had a USB optical drive” moment… Maybe I’ve been lucky, though.

Having fixed computers for salespeople and programmers (who have no idea how computers worked or how to deal with the operating system they were programming for) I tend to go towards the lowest common denominator.

Did you buy it thinking it came with DVD drive? Was that on specs of item sought & bought?
If not, this is just an irritating tease.