It’s annoying when a personal PC won’t start, and you can’t get online or check your emails.

When a corporate PC fails, though, the consequences are often much worse. Employees can’t do their jobs, customers may be impacted, and in some cases there could be knock-on effects right across the business. It’s vital to get the problem solved immediately, then – and O&O Software’s BlueCon 9, released today, could be just the tool to help.

The program comes in the form of a bootable Windows PE-based recovery environment. Launch this from a CD or USB flash drive and you’ll find a familiar Windows desktop, which has been enhanced by a host of troubleshooting and diagnostic tools.

So there are programs to repair file system errors, for instance. To recover some critical accidentally deleted file, or restore an entire lost partition. Or maybe the system won’t start because a faulty driver or service? BlueCon can help there, too.

Bundled user management tools can assist if a user has forgotten their password, or perhaps their user profile has become corrupted. There’s an option to recover from a faulty Windows update. And the SRP Manager can use Windows XP system restore points to wind back the system to a previous state.

And as well as these and other task-specific tools, BlueCon provides a raft of general accessories to help you manually address more complex issues. So you can investigate the stricken system’s event logs, for instance, or edit its Registry. You’re able to manually tweak the PC’s service, driver and user account settings. A simple file manager makes it easy to locate files on the target PC’s hard drive (and copy them elsewhere, if necessary). You can work at a command line; accessories like Notepad and a calculator aim to make your life easier; and there’s even a bundled copy of Firefox, so you can research an issue online or perhaps download any additional files you might need.

The price for all this is $1,090, which may leave your eyes watering if you’re a home user. This is a one-off fee, though; if you manage a large business network, and BlueCon can help you get broken systems working again more quickly then it won’t take long to pay it back. But if it’s just too much, then O&O do offer alternatives; their EasyLicensing SMB scheme, for instance, means you can have BlueCon for a monthly subscription from as little as $29.

If this might work for you, then we’d recommend you give BlueCon a look: it’s easy to set up and use, yet is also a very powerful disaster recovery toolkit, with everything you need to solve all the most common PC problems (and quite a few of the unusual ones, too).