When your Windows 10 PC gets a hard-to-remove virus, you can use Windows Defender Offline to get rid of it once and for all.

It’s happened to you, or to somebody you know. An annoying and dangerous virus or bit of malware has wormed its way onto your computer, and it is wreaking havoc. When these type of malicious codes install themselves on your computer, they can rapidly take control of your PC and cause irreversible damage.

Even if you have an up-to-date antivirus running on your computer, sometimes these threats are very hard to find and remove, often masquerading as part of the operating system. For this reason, Microsoft offers Windows Defender Offline, which is a version of its antivirus that you can run from a USB drive to help you remove malicious code that is infecting Windows 10.

In this Windows 10 guide, we’ll walk you through the process of downloading and creating a bootable USB drive with the stand-alone version of Microsoft’s free antivirus app, and we’ll show you how to use it to clean up your computer from malicious and unwanted programs.

Making a bootable version of Windows Defender Offline

Before proceeding with this guide, you will need external media, preferably a USB flash drive with at least 1GB of capacity, but you can also use a CD/DVD, or you can create an ISO image. This process will wipe and reformat the drive, so make sure you back up any content on if you want to keep to another location.