Hi

Tis been a while since I last played Ob. Lots of stuff left undone though, and with Skyrim coming out my interest has been rekindled in Ob.

Now, is there a patch or mod that allows you to run the game without having the damned CD in the drive? It's a real nuisance these days to still have to put up with this. Hell, X3:TC brought out a patch that got rid of it...

Also, I'm going to install the game on my laptop and play it from that. It's 64 bit Win 7 though. Will everything work as it has done on my 32 bit XP machine? I briefly read the official DLC/mods dont work with 64 bit or something? I assume there is an easy way to get them to run in 64 bit Win7?

Cheers

It'll run fine on Win7 64 as far as I know.

There is no (legal) way to run OB without the disk in the drive.

Win 7 64bit works 100% with mods... there is that nasty thing called UAC (like Vista) so you will want to install OB to a non-program files location (ie C:/games/Oblivion is a common location that windows won't raise constant hell about/with (sometimes silently)), other than that I've never found any issues.
Pacific Morrowind

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, and I have Oblivion, GOTY edition on DVD. It runs just fine, mostly. But, as PM said, don't install it in the default install path, as it can cause problems. I basically don't install ANY programs to Program Files or Program Files (x86) any more. I put them all in a separate folder called Programs, and use that as my 'default' install directory for anything I install.

As for your other request, PM has that right as well. There is no legal way to do so, short of buying a downloadable version off of Steam or Direct 2 Drive(and if I recall correctly, those both offer other problems, like encrypted files, which do have problems with mods, and support utilities like OBSE).

Exactly. The only way you can play Oblivion without a CD and still have OBSE work (minus cd emulation tools) is via Steam. And then you'd have to deal with Steam, so yeah.

I thought Oblivion+mods worked almost perfectly fine with Steam?

I think there were some special steps you had to take in order to play Steam with OBSE..

The biggest problem with a Steam install for a heavily modded game - one that needs the 4Gb patch to run - is that Steam will delete the patched executable, the user then has to reapply the patch to be able to play, and no one has found a way to prevent this from happening. Valve also should be installed in C:games to avoid UAC issues with Vista and 7.
Depending on where you live in the World, Steam can become problematic and an annoyance <--- I have read posts about issues with Steam outside of the U.S. on some forums.

This is correct. Using a no-cd hack violates the EULA. Sorry.