I have USB CD drive. Since I lost the much needed manual, I cannot even find how to force it to boot from CD. I already tried all the known combinations with the F keys (i.e. F1, F2 and so on including some combinations Shft-F8 and Ctrl-F9 and others), but all I get is the WinXP "Safe mode" vs "Normal boot". It seems that I cannot get to the BIOS settings yet.

On a separate note, the ISO image that I've burned booted desktop Sony Vaio without any glitches.