I think I've answered my own question. I pulled the hard drive and retried this and was able to get the laptop into the set-up screen using the F2 key. The only difference I noticed was that it stayed at the Dell splash screen a second or so longer, just enough time to enter the F2 keystroke.
Apparently, simply holding down the F2 key before the splash screen fully appears, even for a second, will cause it to be ignored, so you need to be very quick, I re-installed the drive and retried this, and it missed the F-key and fully booted. I tried again, this time tapping the F-key quickly and apparently I was able to get it to read and enter set-up. I tried F8 for Safe Mode and it did not work until the second attempt.
It seems it boots so quickly into Windows 7, compared to XP, that it was like the F-Keys were being ignored! Perhaps I should not complain about the new-found speed, but this start-up F-Key process is too touchy now ... it seems like a couple of 10ths of a second is all you have ... there should be some option to add a second or two time delay at initial start-up to allow F-Key entry ... anybody know if there is such a setting somewhere within Win7? Thanks again.
kooler king
11 Posts
0
March 30th, 2014 14:00
I think I've answered my own question. I pulled the hard drive and retried this and was able to get the laptop into the set-up screen using the F2 key. The only difference I noticed was that it stayed at the Dell splash screen a second or so longer, just enough time to enter the F2 keystroke.
Apparently, simply holding down the F2 key before the splash screen fully appears, even for a second, will cause it to be ignored, so you need to be very quick, I re-installed the drive and retried this, and it missed the F-key and fully booted. I tried again, this time tapping the F-key quickly and apparently I was able to get it to read and enter set-up. I tried F8 for Safe Mode and it did not work until the second attempt.
It seems it boots so quickly into Windows 7, compared to XP, that it was like the F-Keys were being ignored! Perhaps I should not complain about the new-found speed, but this start-up F-Key process is too touchy now ... it seems like a couple of 10ths of a second is all you have ... there should be some option to add a second or two time delay at initial start-up to allow F-Key entry ... anybody know if there is such a setting somewhere within Win7? Thanks again.