The laptop is an Acer Aspire of I forget the model number whose pre-installed Win8 was nuked to make room for a hard-drive install of Knoppix 7.4.2. It lacks a built-in optical drive, but I was able to talk a less technically inclined person through configuring it so I could boot from an external optical drive. The desktop is a hand-me-down Junker so old it has no Sata ports and lacks a monitor a sighted person could use to assist with altering bios settings, but already favored the optical drive when it came into my possession. It is new enough that it has a multi-card reader built-in instead of a 3.5" floppy drive though the card reader has never worked properly. Not sure what version the borked Windows install I nuked to put Knoppix on it was. Though, what I really need is a method for either installing a screen reader into bios or configuring the bios from within the Linux terminal because trying to talk someone who doesn't know what phrases like "boot order", "legacy boot", and "secure boot" mean through putting a optical drive above the harddrive is hard enough and there are some screwy things with this laptop that make me wish I could go through all the bios options(for example, it won't fully power-off when I issue the halt command which also prevents the reboot command from working properly, and the default configuration lacks a means of turning the monitor off that doesn't turn it back on with the next key press). Sorry for the irrelevant ranting, I just miss the days when Bios defaults didn't seem hostile to Linux users.