95 To 98SE "NO CD-ROM"

I have a friend with a laptop who has W95 as an operating system and wants
me to put 98SE on it. The laptop has no CD player in it. What's the best
way to do this with out using diskettes. Crossover cable with networking?
External CD-Drive? Best application program might be? Not sure if it even
has a USB input or not... can I do it with serial port?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Mike

Note that to use an upgrade version of Windows 98SE you would have to load
the new OS on top of the older OS or have a set of Windows 95 installation
floppies.

Windows 95 doesn't support USB, except for some of the later OEM
distributions. As far as I know even those later versions don't support USB
very well. You friend's notebook probably doesn't have USB ports and may not
be able to utilize an addon port until Windows 98 is installed. Many
external hard drives and CD drives on the market now use a USB port for the
connection to the computer. I don't know if any of the external drives that
used the paralell port are still on the market.

A Network Interface Card (NIC) could probably be installed in the notebook,
but I'm not sure if the procedures that Windows 98 uses to verify the
presence of an genuine installation disk would work through a network. The
CAB files used for the installation could also be copied to the notebook's
hard drive through the network, but again I'm not sure if the setup program
would complete the installation without access to the CD on a local drive.

"BoogieMan" wrote in message
...
I have a friend with a laptop who has W95 as an operating system and wants
me to put 98SE on it. The laptop has no CD player in it. What's the best
way to do this with out using diskettes. Crossover cable with networking?
External CD-Rom? Best application program might be? Not sure if it even
has a USB input or not... can I do it with serial port?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Mike CD-ROM