Updated below:
This little gadget doesn't have a CD/DVD drive, so how the devil do you load pre-owned software onto it? I went to look at external drives today and found nothing at Best Buy for less than $60, or roughly 20% of the purchase price of the entire computer. That seems a bit much.
The problem is with our scanner. It comes with the software to run it on a CD, and one of the reasons for the netbook was to enable us to scan photos. The naming, captioning and tagging of each photo is controlled from the PC. No drive, no loading the scanning software.
I've emailed Epson to see if I can just copy the folder with the software from the desktop to a flash drive and then run/install it to the netbook, but I've gotten no reply yet.
It's always something, isn't it?
Update: We'll see if the solution I found works. (Click on DVD drive under My Computer; click Advanced Sharing under the Sharing tab; click Share. The path is enabled.)
Posted by Linkmeister at December 28, 2009 03:58 PM | TrackBackYou can't download the software from the epson site?
Posted by: Scott at December 28, 2009 04:24 PMDunno. Haven't tried yet, but drivers alone might not be enough, I shouldn't think. I could be wrong, though.
Posted by: Linkmeister at December 28, 2009 04:32 PMI just ran into the same problem with a laptop I bought. If you have a home network and your netbook can connect to it, you can share a CD drive on one of the other computers on the network. Then you just need to connect the netbook to the shared drive and Bob's your uncle.
That last is actually the tricky part. You may have to fiddle with permissions. I tried this using my main machine at work, which already had a shared CD. I kept getting errors, despite the fact that I was using proper credentials. Then I tried connecting to my secondary machine (which is basically a clone of my main machine), and it worked like a charm for no good reason that I can discern. I hate Windows.
Posted by: DXMachina at December 29, 2009 06:47 AMThe real problem you have is that the answer to your first question is: you don't. Those little puppies are NOT intended for general computing use, like scanning photos; they are intended ONLY for email and web browsing, so (as Scott suggested) if you can't download it from the Epson site, you may be SOL. Hope you can make this work...
Posted by: hedera at December 29, 2009 10:11 AMWhat model is your epson scanner? I'd be stunned if you couldn't just download the drivers. I've been using a netbook for a while now, and even though I own an external DVD for it, I've only ever used it for watching DVDs.
Posted by: Scott at December 29, 2009 05:44 PMEpson NX400. It's an all-in-one.
Posted by: Linkmeister at December 29, 2009 07:59 PM