Laptop with recovery disk but dead CD drive

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I have a sony vaio s1xp with a dead Cd drive (seems really dead, doesn’t even spin).
I bought this laptop two thousand years ago and have never reinstalled the O/s (XP) so its slow as hell and bloated as fuck. A reformatting is much needed.
And yet it seems such a task is impossible without a working physical CD drive. I have networking working fine, and have copied the contents of the recovery disks to the D drive, but can’t trigger the recovery process and get it to start.
Anyone got any ideas?

I don’t have any nifty external drives, just a wired and wireless network. The machine runs XP SP2 (just installing sp3 in the vain hope the cd drive will spring to life).
I only want to keep this machine alive as a web browsing gadget. I don’t have a normal XP or vista bootable disk as every machine i buy has come with the O/S pre-installed.
Any ideaz?

2

If you don’t care about dropping windows you could always run linux off of a thumb drive.

But a windows thumb drive might be more of what you’re looking for, Toms hardware talks about that a bit here.

That’s all I’ve got though, sorry.