Do you miss the days of booting into DOS to clean up all that vile malware as much as I do? It drives me crazy to run my favorite virus and spyware scanners for hours only to find that I need to reboot in order to delete the misbehaving files and make other necessary changes. When even that doesn’t work, I’m tempted to give the hard drive in question a permanent home in the circular file.

Why can’t we just boot to the command line like we did in the old days (’90s)? There are some fine bootable Linux distros out there, sure, but that doesn’t usually help me. For some reason, no matter what I do, I just don’t seem to have any luck repartitioning my brain to accommodate Linux.

To my surprise, I recently found that it’s possible to make a bootable Windows CD. I considered this to be at best a novelty until I was working on a customer’s system and every problem I fixed returned with each reboot. I popped in the bootable CD that had been gathering dust, booted from it, opened the appropriate scanners, and walked away for a while. After about an hour and a quick reboot, the system was completely repaired and all my malware worries were gone.

BartPE has a lot of options that can be set for the CD you create, but I just used the defaults and ran the antivirus and spyware utilities from the hard drive by simply browsing through the “Run…” menu. I highly recommend you give BartPE a try for yourself. It turns what was once a long and arduous process into a one-hour “set it and forget it” task.