Windows 7 / Getting Started

Running in Safe Mode

Windows Safe Mode dates to Windows 95. Ancient history. Way back then Safe Mode was designed to disable potentially problematic drivers - long the bugaboo of the Windows development classes - and correct weird problems, like missing desktop icons, that could make it hard to get your computer working.

Although it's hard to describe Safe Mode as obsolete, Microsoft has worked hard in the intervening decade-plus to make Windows startup problem detection and correction much more automatic. That's why I recommend you try the system recovery disc approach discussed in this section or roll back to an earlier restore point (see "Using System Restore and Restore Points," later in this tutorial) before you try the venerable Safe Mode. If you're absolutely convinced that Safe Mode will solve a problem that the automated fixers don't fix, you can find a good overview of Safe Mode and its care and feeding on the PCStats site,
www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1643.

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In this tutorial:

  1. Maintaining Your System
  2. Coping with Start-Up Problems
  3. Creating a system repair disc
  4. Using the system repair disc
  5. Running in Safe Mode
  6. Working with Backups
  7. Restoring a file with shadow copies (previous versions)
  8. Maintaining previous versions on different drives
  9. Creating data backups
  10. Managing and restoring data backups
  11. Getting back the image backup
  12. Maintaining Drives
  13. Running an error check
  14. Defragmenting a drive
  15. Using System Restore and Restore Points
  16. Creating a restore point
  17. Rolling back to a restore point
  18. Scheduling the Task Scheduler
  19. Starting with your parameters
  20. Scheduling a task
  21. Zipping and Compressing
  22. Compressing with NTFS
  23. Zipping the easy way with Compressed (zipped) Folders
  24. Using the Windows 7 Resource Monitor and Reliability Monitor
  25. Controlling the Control Panel
  26. Removing and changing programs