Laptop with no hard drive.

NowRetired

I have a laser printer that does not like to work with Windows 8 64 bit.

There is no solution to it not working with Windows 8 64 bit.

I do a lot of B&W documents and using a colour inkjet is not all that cost effective.

2,529 A4 pages so far and still on the original toner cartridge.

And I still have a spare toner cartridge.

Try doing that on an inkjet printer.

So I have been using an old laptop with Windows XP to print, transferring the files VIA a cat 5 cable.

Now the hard drive has failed irreparably.

Is there any way I can get the laptop to boot from a DVD and run Office 2003, or any other program, that will print documents produced in Word 2010, to an old HP laser printer?

I would buy a new printer but there is nothing wrong with the old one and it would also mean getting rid of a £80 toner cartridge.

That is all the laptop is required to do and after August that will be someone else's problem as I won't be doing the printing anymore so not very cost effective to buy a new hard drive.

At present I have moved my printer to a friend who has a Windows XP computer but he does not have internet so I can't email him the documents to print and have to take them to him on a flash drive

Also I do all this at no cost to the club I do this for so you can see my reluctance to spend any money:rotfl:

Avoriaz

As far as I am aware you need a working disk in the laptop. You can boot XP from a CD but you can't run Office etc without a disk. Maybe Linux would be a solution but I don't know about that.


I know you don't want to spend money but you could probably buy a used but working replacement disk for the laptop quite cheaply. Shop around and you could probably get one for just a few pounds.

If it is an XP machine it probably uses 2.5 inch PATA disk and they are very cheap on ebay and elsewhere.

Do you have the original XP CDs etc?

closed

http://lifehacker.com/5965889/how-to-run-windows-xp-for-free-in-windows-8 possibly

has the hd really had it?

Lum

How old is your laser printer? I have an HP LaserJet 4 from 1993, 20 years old, working fine in Windows 8. I bet yours would work too if you lied and told Windows 8 it was actually a LaserJet4.

Leo2020

You could boot into Linux from CD. You can open Word documents in Libre Office/Open Office which works on Linux.

But for the sake of ease I would just buy/get an old HDD from somewhere. Do you know anyone with an old laptop they don't use anymore which you could take the HDD out of?

You could get a second hand HDD off eBay, if it is a PATA one not SATA then there is a 40GB one here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Fujitsu-40GB-2-5-LAPTOP-HARD-DISK-DRIVE-HDD-IDE-PATA-/111034091737?pt=UK_Computing_HardDrives_RL&hash=item19da25c8d9

Or try Lum's suggestion.

Mr_Toad

What make and model of printer?

A friend of mine bought a new Windows 8 64 bit PC a couple weeks ago and asked me to set it up for her.

I was more than a little surprised to find that she was still using an old HP 815c Deskjet printer that doesn't even have a USB port, it has the older parallel centronics port.

I got her a £3 adapter cable to try and it just worked, much to my amazement!

almillar

Apart from the suggestions above to use another computer - no you can't run Office from a DVD.
How do you know the drive's completely dead? Are you sure you can't take it out an put in into a USB enclosure (as above, check whether it's PATA/IDE (lots of pins) or SATA). and recover some files. If you are able to recover anything and get a new drive that's great, but even if you can't recover anything, you can reintall everything on another drive if you still have the disks and serial numbers. Look on eBay for prices of drives, you may be surprised at how cheap they are.