jason smith - 2019-04-01

I am hoping some super-savy techy in here can guide me to a solution. FYI I am a self-employed IT support engineer with 20 years experience.
I have 2 laptops with the following issue and I hope whoever answers (if I get ANY answers) reads this properly and doesn't assume I am a noob who doesn't know how to change BIOS settings to boot from a USB (in the normal manner).

The first laptop is an Acer ES1-132-C06L.
This one came with Windows 10 and I wanted to downgrade to Windows 7, but couldn't boot from an external USB. Called Acer in the end, they told me it wasn't possible and needed to pay them to do it, if Win10 ever needed re-installing. Thanks Acer! (I can boot it up from the Vracrypt recovery USB mentioned below though)

The second is more interesting. Just picked this one up today. Toshiba c40-c-10q. The owner says he somehow deleted Windows, couldn't explain to me coherently how he did it.
I suspected this would be the same as the Acer, and it certainly seems that way. However, I have discovered that both laptops will boot (to the Veracrypt options list, where you can reset bootloader etc) off of the Veracrypt EFI recovery USB that I created for another laptop. So from this it looks as though we can actually boot from a USB stick. I cannot boot from a USB stick containing Windows 10 though. I have tried creating a EFI Win10 USB using Rufus, but that won't boot either.
My thinking is that if it can boot the Veracrypt recovery USB then it must be possible to boot a Windows USB stick.

This second laptop is unusable as it doesnt boot into windows at all, the first one is booting into windows 10 (pre-installed) just fine. My biggest quest is to get windows installed on the second laptop.

Can anyone shed any light on my thoughts/observations?

Thanks for reading