Need assistance entering the bios in Win 7 Pro

Here's something that may help you: BIOS Access Keys for Computer Systems (Lenovo, Sony, HP, Dell, etc.)

Basically, she should start tapping the F2 key right away if there are no banners at all for such things as Dell, or the video card, etc... If any banners are displayed, start tapping F2 after the last one clears ans a blank screen appears.

No need to do that. Just press F12 when starting to boot and continue tapping it every second or so until the Boot menu comes up. Chose the optical drive from there to boot it.

I prefer to have my hard drive as the first boot device and use F12 whenever I need to boot from Optical or USB flash drive.

If there`s nothing in the cd/dvd drive the computer goes to the next bootable device (the hard drive) it`s fine to leave it 1st.

If the optical drive does NOT contain a bootable disk of some type, it will be bypassed and the PC will try to boot from the next item on the menu. If all items on the menu fail, you'll get a message to the effect of not finding a system disc.

ignatzatsonic said:

If the optical drive does NOT contain a bootable disk of some type, it will be bypassed and the PC will try to boot from the next item on the menu.

I find that if I do this and have a NON bootable disk in the optical drive, my machine takes longer to boot. It's ASUS based, maybe that's why. I use Ztruker's trick of selecting the boot device when I have to boot from optical, and leave my hard disk as first boot device.

Not all machines respond to the F12 key for boot options which is why I would not recommend that option unless I knew for sure that the person's machine supported it.

HP uses F9. Some use Esc, some do not have the support. Dell uses F12 for sure.

My ASUS board uses F8, which is just daft as far as I'm concerned. I have to be very careful not to wind up in safe mode. But I still prefer that method over setting my optical to first boot.