Dell Adamo entering safe mode on Windows 7 (F8 doesn’t work)

For those of you that have a computer that won’t give you safe mode options when you hit F8 repeaditly at startup can try another alternative.  My Dell Adamo wouldn’t give me safe mode options when I tried to use the default F8 procedure, so I figured why not try all the function keys and started with F1.  When I repeadtly pressed F1 at start up it gave me the option to “choose an operating system to start” but it also gave me the option to press F8 and get advanced options, when I did that there was the basic safe mode boot options menu.