So on the Acer (desktop), you can't even get to a boot prompt. Whereas on the Vaio (laptop), you can't enter anything at the boot prompt because the USB keyboard doesn't work. These symptoms sound like a bad burn or something wrong in hardware/BIOS.

Can you 1) test on another machine which can run testcd, and/or 2) burn a new copy (slower is better)?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/