Safe mode for Windows 8 allows you to boot into a minimal environment to troubleshoot issues.
Safe mode for Windows 8 allows you to boot into a minimal environment to troubleshoot issues.
Hi everyone. I helped my girlfriend set up her laptop by installing Avast after she mentioned no antivirus was installed. During a full system scan, Avast stopped working, which led me to suspect McAfee was already running and interfering. I tried removing McAfee via the control panel but got an error about lack of access, so I asked her to reach out to the system admin. Her account is the admin, and she’s the only one using it.
I enabled minimal safe boot using msconfig, which let her adjust settings but didn’t remove McAfee. After restarting in minimal safe mode, she still faces login issues—she sees an invalid password prompt and can’t see the mouse pointer on the login screen. I’m wondering if running in minimal safe mode instead of network mode is affecting her login experience.
Could switching back to normal boot or enabling network safe mode without opening Windows settings help? Since she doesn’t have any media like a restore disk, what’s the best way to get her back online without using MSConfig?
From the login screen, hold the shift key and press restart. This opens advanced boot settings where you can choose troubleshooting then advanced boot options. After rebooting, you’ll see a black screen with white numbered startup choices. I believe option 3 is safemode with networking (also includes the standard boot as number 1). You should be able to locate the McAfee uninstaller via the start menu. Right-click it and select "Run as administrator." Based on your laptop’s brand, there may be a built-in recovery partition. You can reach it by pressing a specific screen from the post-screen (press escape on the post logo screen to note it).