How to enter safe mode windows vista home premium

My HP came with Vista bit preinstalled so I don't have a CD to boot from, so I can't even do a system restore which would be my last resort anyway. I've looked at the current posts, but haven't found one where the SAFE mode would also not work.

I can get to the Setup, and can get to the F8 screen, but beyond that nothing works. I 'think' I have disabled the 'restart on error' but am not sure if the system got far enough to accomplish that. Any suggestions on what to try next?

Also, I have Norton installed if that may be relative -- but obviously I cannot get to it to disable I'm on my laptop which was shut down for the same length of time, but it came up with no problem bit Vista, so perhaps that makes a difference.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No. Sorry this didn't help. And when you're done, I strongly urge you to re-enable your user account s and promptly disable the Administrator account. If your goal in accessing the Administrator account is to ditch User Account Controls, a somewhat safer way to do that would be to stick with your account with computer-administrator privileges the one that is not named Administrator.

Open the User Account Control Panel. On the subsequent screen, you'll find an easy way to turn off UAC. There is another possible wrinkle on Method 2. It is possible to set a password for your Administrator account. But there's another way to manage user accounts: the User Accounts Control Panel. User Accounts doesn't display any settings for the Administrator account until you're booted into that account. But once you're booted into Administrator, it lets you set a password for it without any negative effects.

So this is a work-around if you'd like to leave your Administrator account enabled. It's important to protect it with a password that's not easy to guess or arrive at by trial and error.

Despite what it may seem to some people, Microsoft's decision to disable and lightly hide the Administrator account in Windows was a very good one. Millions of people have for many years been living in this account -- many without even having set a password for it. Doing so makes it easy for malware and hackers to waltz into an account that has unlimited access to the operating system. By changing the name for the account on your computer that has administrative privileges, and by setting a password for it, Windows security is raised considerably.

The user experience for dealing with User Account Control elevations, although improved in Windows Vista Post-Beta-2 Build , is still a little rough. Microsoft has designed UAC in a way that keeps you from having to reboot between changes, but there are still too many nuisance UAC prompts.

There's still development time to go on Vista's User Account Controls. Online editorial director Scot Finnie has been an editor for a variety of IT publications for more than 20 years. This article was adapted from the July issue of Scot's Newsletter and is used by permission.

Scot Finnie, former Editor in Chief of Computerworld, is a freelance writer with decades of experience covering the IT industry. Here are the latest Insider stories.

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