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There's nothing more critical to an operating system like Windows than the boot device. Typically, that's the hard drive where the core system is installed. But during boot, you can also take advantage of a temporary boot device, like a flash drive. This option is particularly useful during emergencies when the computer won't boot, or there's some kind of corruption going on with the system files. You can essentially keep a bootable media format handy to bypass internal storage and get things working again. That brings us to the $10 USB gadget that can help you rescue your PC — as you might have guessed, that gadget is a keychain-friendly USB drive .

To be clear, USB drives, including versions that fit on or serve as a keychain, vary in price from around $10 to much, much higher, depending on the capacity and speed of the drive.…