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I recently had a driver issue which meant that there was no output from my GPU as soon as I got into the Windows environment. This was compounded by the lack of ability to boot into safe mode to fix the issue as I couldn't see to do anything. F8 at boot has been disabled (the reason from MS is "because it's so fast at booting, no one has time". I think this is the smelliest of bull and I expect it has been removed to aid in shortening boot times).
In preparation for issues like this recurring in the future, I have now re-enabled the F8 boot menu and there is no appreciable difference to boot times. The command to do this is at the bottom in case anyone feels like doing it themselves before it costs them hours of frustration when they have an issue to fix. There are other ways of accessing safe mode. The one I had to use was restarting, powering off during the boot process, repeat until it starts trying to diagnose a problem and gives you the safe mode option (deep in menus). This is clearly an awful and potentially damaging way of doing it.
If anyone has a reason why you shouldn't enable this menu, please do let me know.
To enable it, open a command prompt as administrator* and type bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy
I personally wish I'd done this before the lack of safe mode access cost me 3 hours.
*To do this, press WINDOWS+R, type "CMD" and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER then press "yes" when it nags you.
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