Question from Ashley: Hey there! I just got a new Acer Aspire Touchscreen Laptop and I have an old game that I want to put on it. However, the new laptop doesn’t have an optical disk drive.
Is there any possible way to transfer a CD’s contents onto a USB drive so I can play the game on my laptop? Thanks so much!!!
Rick’s answer: Ashley, there are several methods of transferring software from an optical disc to a USB flash drive, but I no longer recommend any of them for reasons that I will explain below.
What I now recommend instead is to purchase a cheap external USB optical drive. That way you will be able to install CD/DVD based software on your laptop, listen to CDs, or do most anything else with optical discs that you need to do.
There are two reasons why I now suggest this approach:
1 – Simplicity – All you have to do is plug the external optical drive into an open USB port, then insert the CD into the drive and get busy with the task at hand.
2 – Low cost – You can literally purchase an external USB DVD drive for about what you would pay for a decent size USB flash drive. In fact, as of this writing, the drive that I personally use and recommend can be purchased from Amazon for less than $20. Click here to check it out.
If you prefer, you can also purchase one of these drives at Best Buy or another local retail electronics store for just a few dollars more.
Now with the above being said, I need to mention something of a caveat…
You didn’t say how old the game in question actually is, just that it’s old and on an installation CD. If it happens to be “ancient” (in tech years) there’s a good chance that it might not run (or even install) properly under Windows 10.
If it ran under Windows 8.1 it should run just fine under Windows 10. And chances are it will run ok if it ran under Windows 7.
However, if it previously ran on either a Windows Vista or Windows XP machine, all bets are off.
But even if you find out that it won’t run on your new PC, it’s still not a bad idea to have an external USB optical drive on hand given their low costs.
I hope this helps Ashley. Good luck!
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