Toshiba W-7 went dark

When it rains it pours. The Toshiba LP W-7 64 went dark. It was fine, was
shut off and when I hit the On button a few days later, just a black screen
with a blinking " - " in the upper left-hand corner. Tapping the F8 is
supposed to bring up Safe Mode (as per Google) but instead up came a screen
to do a memory scan. After it finished I tried again and it came up with 6
tabs of technical info that's alien to me. None of the tabs were for Safe
Mode. I had no way to know what to do on any of the screens. Anyone know how
to get Safe Mode to come up on a Toshiba W-7?

Where do I go from here? The LP actually gets little use and is like new. I
hate to recycle it.

I noticed a few days before that the battery wasn't charging. Since it was
almost always used plugged in, it didn't matter.