I just picked up a piece of malware on the other computer – ransomware claiming the government had shut me down for violating various laws and demanding $400 to get me working again, blah blah blah. I didn’t fall for it and I’m restoring the system across the room; that is not the problem.
I just have a question. Getting into Safe Mode used to be ridiculously easy in Windows, but in 8, that option is buried only a whole ton of crap. As one does not need to go into safe mood every day, I’d not had occasion to find this out till today (though I’ve had the infected computer since, I think, October or November). What advantages are there to the user in the current setup?
Microsoft is now choosing to go the automatic repair route rather than making you go through Safe Mode. The options they put first (the ones that “refresh” your computer or something like that) are the ones they want people to use.
They want Safe Mode to be more of an advanced user tool.
er, it works the same as past versions of Windows NT. F8 just as Windows starts loading (though Win 8 boots fast enough where this might be a challenge) or set it to boot to Safe Mode in msconfig.
Why did they bury it? Because Windows 8 is for tablets and tablets don’t have keyboards.
No, in previous versions of windows you press F8 and it’s an option that is immediately presented to you. In Windows 8 step 1 is to press F8 (if you can get it in time), but then you have to go through a bunch of other steps to get into safe mode.
And even holding it down continuously from the time began the restart didn’t work, incidentally.
I tried multiple times to reboot it by holding down F8; it never worked. Then I checked the help file, using this computer, and held down F8 & Shift at the same time. Didn’t work. Then I did the charms thing (which I never use otherwise) and tunnelled through all the stuff to get it down.
In other news, I’ve run Rkill & MalwareBytes on that computer, found & eliminated the trojan, and it seems tobe working. I only ran it MB in quick mode, though. Am I correct to tell my nephew that he can’t use the computer until MB is finished withthe (much longer-lasting!) complete scan?
There’s five icons that appear if you move your mouse icon to the far right of the screen in just the right way, or, I suppose, ifyou have a touch screen and do something or other I have no idea about. Mostly I find it annoying,to tell you the truth.
And it occurs to me that whoever made the observation about Win8 being for pads is right. I don’t do pads.
Definitely run the full MB scan before you do much more. If you’ve been using it to log into banking accounts and the like, change your password once it’s clean (or from a work computer).
That’s what I figured, that’s what I told Nephew the Rhymer. Fortunately the computer in question is not used for banking or any other sensitive transactions.
From my observations, Microsoft’s preferred method of solving problems is to hide them from the user.
System crash? Automatically restart, so users have no idea if it’s a problem with the power supply, data corruption or some other hardware issue.
Red ring of death on Xbox? Remove the ring of red lights from the 360 S.