Stay Safe

I have not seen the removal of Safe Mode from the Fall Creators Update mentioned anywhere. Am I the only one who has noticed?

I recently plugged in a second Bluetooth receiver by mistake, and then things went downhill. The PC got stuck in an endless boot loop, from which I could not recover. In trying to boot into Safe Mode to attempt the removal of any bad or corrupt drivers, I could find no way to do so— not from a recovery media or the install media.

What is one supposed to do if they need Safe Mode? I ended up doing a complete reinstall, losing all my activated software.

– Lee Boszak

EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: Safe Mode is still present, though it has shifted around quite a bit in recent releases of Windows, so I’m not at all surprised that you think it’s disappeared. To find it, type “Safe” into the Start menu to open the Recovery options page in the Windows Settings panel. Here you’ll find two sections: “Reset this PC” and “Advanced Startup.” Click the button titled “Restart now” under “Advanced Startup,” and then, after a reboot, press 4 to start Safe Mode. If you’re having problems getting into Windows in the first place, rebooting your machine three times by holding down the power button

forcing Windows to get to the same screen.