Paul,, It didn't work. I was realizing that in order to boot from a usb, one must always start with the machine off, or perhaps from a restart, yet i usually shut down, so I've tried that before. It was a good exercise since it inspired me to test the usbs I intended to use to make sure they worked. They do, so the Dell cannot be booted from usb. I guess that means it may be useless to me unless There is some magic trick to get Linux installed. Maybe it will just be for old software that won't run on windows. I will have to test the old software on my tower Kubuntu. Maybe that will work. If you know of any potential magic tricks please let me know. Thanks.