Is it possible to upgrade the OS without a working CD drive?

Hi,
I have an older Powerbook G4 running OS 10.3.9. It's still (mostly) working, and I've managed to get by without updating my OS, because I was told that it would compromise performance if I tried to update to OS 10.4 or later.
However, I just bought a lovely new iPhone 3GS, only to discover to my dismay that I can't synch it with my laptop without running OS 10.4.11.
I would be willing to compromise performance to be able to synch my iPhone and be able to use the contacts and calendar and iTunes, etc. on both devices.
But that leaves me with a bigger problem, which is that my laptop's CD/DVD drive died ages ago. Which really hasn't been a problem (I just use flash drives and an external hard-drive to transfer files, etc.). And it hasn't seemed worthwhile to fix it because the computer is so old, so I'm just trying to squeeze a bit more useful life out of it until I can afford to buy a new one. But now I imagine it probably means I'm unable to upgrade my OS.
Unless it's possible to do the upgrade some other way, which doesn't require using the CD drive?
And if it is possible to upgrade some other way, how much will performance be compromised? (It's a 1GHz PowerPC G4 (3.2) with a 1 MB L3 cache, and 1 GB SDRRAM, or so my "About This Mac" tells me!
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You could buy an external DVD drive. It needs to be firewire and bootable by Mac OS. If you have another PPC with firewire, you could try target Disk mode and installed tiger that way.
outoforderorder explains how...
By the way, here it is how you find the terminal application.
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
From: san francisco,ca
Registered: Apr 27, 2007
Re: Do the widgets drain system resources and power?
Posted: Apr 28, 2007 2:51 PM
I tend to think dashboard is neat, but not neccesary for my everyday workflow.
it is possible to enable and disable it as needed,
by entering the following commands into the terminal:
#To turn Dashboard off:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
#To turn Dashboard on:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
#*You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect:
killall Dock
Bye Bye Dashbaord
http://www.kainjow.com/kermitsoft/downloads.html
Disable Spotlight, Bonjour and Dashboard:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8749558#8749558

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