This misunderstanding seems still to be going on, so search for the name Packard Bell and you will find that it never was owned by HP or will ever be that.
Since this laptop was introduced in 2010 and running the then-current Windows 7, I think the reason you’re not finding Secure Boot settings is because Secure Boot wasn’t a thing yet:
Secure Boot was first introduced in Windows 8 to protect against the emerging pre-boot malware (also known as a bootkit) threat at that time.
source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/windows-secure-boot-certificate-expiration-and-ca-updates-7ff40d33-95dc-4c3c-8725-a9b95457578e
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification was invented around 1998 by the Intel Corporation and kept confidential until 2006. In 2012, the “Secure Boot” feature got introduced to the specification.
source: https://docs.system-transparency.org/st-1.0.0/docs/selected-topics/secureboot_concepts/
If you get Win 10 working again, you can check if your computer supports Secure Boot…I’m guessing that it doesn’t:
https://www.microscopesinternational.com/support/kb/article/ngn1163.aspx
my bad,… search engines nor youtube are what they used to be..
i copy pasted the packard bell in there and searched for videos in the bios to try to find something… and ALL videos i found were hp so i assumed it must be hp as i never heard about packard bell before…
Packard Bell is sold in the Netherlands and is part of Acer.
@OP what happens if you install eos from another machine on the drive from the laptop and place it back ?
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Just thought of something else , if this has been a business laptop they might have disabled booting from USB flash drive by tinkering with the Windows registry
Thanks, @Mellow - but on this Packard Bell the BIOS is not as extensive as on this HP. The only options I have, as far as booting is concerned, is to select a boot device. But whatever device I have selected, the laptop still boots Windows.
The initial BIOS version was 1.01, and I found a version 1.23. I hoped that this newer version would have more boot options, more BIOS options. But unfortunately, that is still not the case.
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No problem - you’re not the only one; I also found many sources talking about HP solutions when people asked about Packard Bell problems.
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That was one of the first things I tried. But in that case the laptop will only show a message: “no system found”.
It seems they are growing again in North America en Africa, under license of Acer, if this wiki article is to be believed:
You guess right. I got W10 running again. In msinfo32.exe it says: “secure boot: not supported”.
So there is indeed no point in searching for an option to disable secure boot.
But then again: secure boot can not be the cause of not being able to boot any other OS… 
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But at least you won’t waste any more time on Secure Boot. 
You know more about Windows than I do 
.
Looked at the START DWORD in USBSTOR, but it’s already set to 3, the value needed to enable USB…
Indeed!
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Searched some more info on registry settings that could prevent a boot from a different device - no luck.
Just a wild guess here, but maybe try changing from UEFI to Legacy BIOS/CSM (assuming the BIOS has that available, I would hope it would). Maybe it’ll boot in that mode.
Sadly, no. No such option either.
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Yet…I have a cunning plan… once more into the breach! 
I’ll keep you posted how that goes.
So, if I were trying it….I would remove the drive…use another computer to install EOS & then modify the efi file similar to the way I’ve been doing it on HP laptops (move the Windows efi file up a level & replace the Windows efi with EOS’s efi—this is assuming you are using Grub). After you have done this….then reinstall the drive & test for operation.
BootThis menu allows the user to decide the order of boot devices to load the operating system. Bootable devicesincludes the USB diskette drives, the onboard hard disk drive and the DVD drive in the module bay.Select Boot Devices to select specific devices to support boot.
If I look at this it might not be possible to boot from a usb flash drive at all, so pull out your usb floppy drive or burn a DVD 
Thank you, @ExDebianuser! but as we speak EOS is being installed on the laptop .
As @Stagger_Lee ‘s suggestion pointed out the problem was not secure boot, and as it was also established that I have no choice to switch from legacy to uefi, and as “fast boot” was turned off and could not be a problem either, I figured that these aspects could not play a role in this problem. In fact, if anything, there should be no such “stringent” security things in place at all on this laptop.
So, surely, the cause of the problem seemed to be that somewhere settings in lowlevel firmware or windows were preventing me from booting from other devices.
But just one hour ago or so I realized: this is a very old laptop and perhaps there was something “too new” about how the install media I tried (2 different usb sticks, 1 ssd) were formatted, or written to, or what have you.
I always use dd, but perhaps that was not the correct way in this case?
So I searched some more with that in mind. And I came across info [1], where Rufus [2] was mentioned, which app can “apply fixes for old BIOS’s”. So in Windows I downloaded Rufus and EOS, ticked the “old BIOS” options and then let Rufus write EOS to the USB stick.
Then I rebooted and hurray! the message “Welcome to EndeavourOS appeared”.
It only took me 2 days…
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1018918/cant-boot-from-ubuntu-usb-stick:
if your USB has a GPT partition table, it won’t work in legacy-computer, and if your USB has a MBR-partition table, it won’t work in UEFI-computer (might work since UEFI is the new standard and may be backwards compatible).
[2]
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