Sharing a DVD burner across a wireless network

Hi,

I'm running a home network, with my Toshiba Windows XP laptop wirelessly 'speaking' to a Dell Windows XP desktop via a NETGEAR 802.11g wireless connection.

I'm sharing internet and printers fine, but I was wondering, is it possible to share the DVD burner on my desktop with my laptop?

Thanks

NTi has for sometime ,and Nero 6.0, do allow you to reach into other computers through the network and burn files from them. Never tried the way you posted. Had no need to.

To read files from the drive, you can just share it like any other directory and access it over the network.

For burning, in general you need to do that from the machine with the burner. What it'll actually do is copy the files over the network before it starts burning anyway, just because of typical network performance compared to high-speed burning.

Yes, I see your point. Ultimatelly, the files have to be transferred acrosss the network, so it makes little difference which computer I run the burner from.

What I was trying to do was make a back-up of the My Documents folder on my laptop to DVD. But as my laptop has no DVD burner, I was trying to access the DVD burner on the desktop. This was to save time transferring the files over across the network, then using the burner from the desktop.

But of course, even if I was to access the burner from the laptop, the files would still have to be transferred, just at a later point in the process.

I think what I'll do is take my external drive that I have with the laptop, downstairs to the desktop, plug it in, and burn it from there.

Thanks for your help.