Most guides said to mash F8 while booting. She tried it three times. Nothing happened. Windows 11, she learned, boots too fast for F8 to work anymore. Frustration crept in.

When Maria’s HP Pavilion laptop started acting up—random blue screens, a wallpaper that vanished into black, and a cursor that moved like it was stuck in molasses—she felt that familiar pit in her stomach. Her thesis draft was on the desktop. Her heart raced. She immediately thought, “It’s dead. I’ve lost everything.”

Twenty minutes later, she restarted normally. The laptop purred to life—wallpaper back, cursor smooth, thesis safe.

On the fourth boot, a blue screen appeared—not a crash, but the screen. She clicked Advanced Options > Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Startup Settings > Restart .

Then she found the real trick for modern HP Pavilions.

She grabbed her phone and searched: “How to start HP Pavilion in Safe Mode.”

In Safe Mode, she ran a quick antivirus scan (which found and removed a rogue driver update), then used System Restore to roll her Pavilion back to a point from last week.