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Hi Everybody!

For a while now I've been wanting to buy myself a tablet so that I can upgrade myself from just pencil-and-paper art to digital. However, the laptop that I currently own is small (a Lenovo Idea Pad, to be precise) and it doesn't have a disc drive.
The tablet I've had my eye on is the Wacom Bamboo Pen as it is cheap and I'm not in a good spot financially right now, but one of the requirements is that my computer has a disc drive. Therefore, I have the following questions:

1) Is the CD included really necessary, or does it just have software I can (legally, please) download off the internet somewhere or extra stuff that doesn't absolutely have to be included?

2) If not, is there another tablet of the same price and quality that I can get that doesn't require a CD?

3) As a last resort, would it be possible to set it up on another computer somewhere else that does have a disc drive, and then plug the tablet back into my laptop/transport the files on a USB drive or something and have it work okay?

I don't expect an answer right away or that anyone can answer all three, but any and all help would be nice!

Thanks a bunch!

Odd, the small Bamboo is $69 on the wacom site but about $99 everywhere else. sweatdrop On that note, I have a graphire 2 which wacom has discontinued but works very well, I've had it since 2002, if you shop around you might be able to find one at a decent price. The drawing surface is a bit larger than the Bamboo and from what I've read, it didn't get as much criticism. It is an older model (the one with the usb is not slick looking) so I don't know if you'd go for that, but you could consider.
As far as install, you can just download the driver.

Thank you all so much!

@binkari: Okay, cool. I wasn't sure if I could do that. I didn't even know they had a download site. eek

@Dafty924: Maybe I can find a Graphire somewhere else- it sounds like it's worth looking into, so I might go check it out and/or see if there's a relatively cheap one floating around somewhere.

@Good Morning My Son: Yeah, it said the the tablet came with Corel Painter Essential 4.0, but I can just get another program from somewhere else. Depending on how costly the external CD drive is though I might see if I can afford it (although even if I can download the necessary installation stuff from online, having one just for general usage might come in handy).

Thanks again, you've all been a super huge help!