Is it possible to update the BIOS to let me boot from a USB drive?

The project: make a bootable USB drive running PuppyLinux.

The problem: the target computer – an old HP Pavilion laptop – has and recognizes its two USB ports, but the BIOS doesn’t put them on the list of devices that you can boot from. It does, however, let you boot from a floppy.
The computer’s owner would like to switch over to Linux entirely at some point, but not right now and he really likes the idea of the OS-on-a-stick.

It is my hope to update the BIOS to resolve the issue, but if we could get it to think of the flash drive as the now-useless floppy drive, I think we could call that a win as well.