No offence... but $750 for a freakin' DVD/CDRW drive???????
Thats nuts!
If your laptop supports standard size optical media drives you can probably find a replacement for much, much cheaper (if one is needed).
Also check to see if you lappy supports booting from external media, such as a USB CDROM. Maybe you could "borrow" one from best buy for long enough to do a quick install.
And last but not least, you could always yank the hard drive and slap an adaptor on it (
http://66.216.68.88/details.htm?productid=4A-1097) and drop it into desktop, clear it off, and make it bootable. Hell, you can even start an XP install on it. All you have to do is start the install in windows (Win98 works well for this, fast and easy to install, hell all you need it for is reading the CD), choose full installation instead of upgrade, then under Advanced installation options choose to copy all the files to the hard drive first.
Of course, this only works if your CDROM drive isn't borked.... did you check your ASPI drivers? (If you had them , XP doesn't come with them natively.)
Ok, sorry that was so long!