How To Enable Safe Mode On Windows 8 Laptop

Safe mode is necessary when you need to diagnose hardware and or software issues. It ensures that you have the basic of drivers for the OS to operate and thus rules out most, if not all, compatibility issues. It also disables a lot of the services that may otherwise be running in the background making it handy to uninstall some pesky viruses and on other occasions ridding yourself of an anti-virus. This tutorial will show you how to enable Safe Mode on your Windows 8 laptop.

1. If you can boot into GUI without complications, click on the power button located at the bottom right corner of your Settings Charm bar. You can do the same at the Windows Login screen.[/b]

2. When you see the new pop up window with the options to Sleep, Shutdown and Restart, hold down the shift key and click on Restart.

3. After you reboot, you will see a new window with a blue background with three options.

4. Choose Troubleshoot.

5. Click on Advanced options.

6. Click on Startup Settings.

7. Click on Restart at the bottom right corner.

8. After the follow up restart, you will be greeted with the same blue background window with numbers against each option. Options 4 to 6 are for Enabling Safe Mode, Enabling Safe Mode with Networking and Enabling Safe Mode with Command Prompt.


9. For the sake of this tutorial we will choose option 4. You can press F4 on your keyboard or tap 4 on the numeric key. You can likewise use F5 or F6 for options 5 and 6 respectively.

10. You should now boot into Safe Mode. Once you’re done with your task in Safe Mode, reboot the system and you will end up back into the regular GUI for your OS.

If you can’t boot into Windows 8’s GUI but require to go into Safe Mode, you can do so using merely your keyboard however you will need to disable UEFI in your BIOS and/or enable CSM within BIOS.

11. Power up your laptop running Windows 8, while the system is booting, hold down the shift key and continuously tap the F8 key. You should be greeted with a screen as stated in step 3. Follow through from steps 3 to step 9 to enter into Safe Mode. As stated in step 10, reboot your system to enter into GUI. In this instance it’s advised that you enable UEFI for your BIOS/disable CSM in BIOS.

Hopefully after following the above steps you’ve successfully managed to enter into Safe Mode and back out into your Windows 8 GUI.