Yes. pressALT F2 at the same time. Type in up-date-manager. Click on the run
button. It will ask you to up-date. Just follow through the prompts.
The other is the terminal way. Open up the terminal in Applications>TerminalType
in or copy and past this command
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
It will ask you for your password for sudu. It may be the one you log into.

You need to upgrade 8.04 to 10.04 first (from LTS to LTS versions). Then you
can upgrade 10.04 to 10.10 without going through the intervening releases.
However, upgrades are not reliable in my experience and doing too much
upgrading increases the chances of something going wrong.

Hardy (8.04) was a LTS release and is good for six more months. Lucid
(10.04) is also LTS and has a longer shelf life than 10.10. My
recommendation would be to upgrade from LTS to LTS and stop at 10.04 unless
you have a really good reason to want Maverick (10.10).

Lucid expires in 13-04 and Maverick expires one year earlier.

Yes, but why? Keep your eyes open for a discarded computer, it probably contains
a working CD-ROM drive.

My computer is an off brand laptop. The CDrom has power, will open and close but
is not recognized by the OS or the BIOS. I have several old desktop CD/DVD
drives in my garage.

Sounds like a hardware problem but short of fitting a new laptop
DVD/CD drive you'll not know if it's a drive or controller error.
Overall probably not worth it ?

Question is whether this laptop will boot from a USB device. If it
will you can either use a Flash Drive or a CD Drive caddy for one of
those desktop ones you have.

Loose cable???????????????????????????

There are many installation possibilities that you may have not considered:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation

I upgraded to 8.10, 9.4, 9.10, and now have 10.4.
I may have to open the laptop to see if it is a cable problem.

Very few laptops have cables to connect the CD/DVD drive, they are
usually plugged directly into a connector on the motherboard. Worth
removing and plugging back in again to see if it makes any difference
but I'd doubt it. May be that the drive has failed and the wisest move
would be to replace it. Again most use a generic laptop drive with a
proprietary interface that unscrews from the old drive and is fixed to
the new one before plugging in.

BTW - as has been said often upgrading multiple times isn't a good
idea overall and you would be better off doing a clean install of
10.04LTS or 10.10 if you don't mind the regular upgrading.