Buy any computer, clean out the crap, get all of the security updates, install you applications and antivirus etc., purchase Acronis True Image Home (< $50) and make an image backup onto DVD, another partition, or to an external hard drive. The image backup will be compressed down to about 50% of the used portion of the C: partition. If anything goes wrong with your OS, or if the hard drive fails you can boot up from your emergency boot disk and restore from your image backup (in less than 30 minutes) and everything will look and work just like it did when you made the image backup.

This is far better than a factory restore CD/DVD because there's no crap on it, it will have all of the security updates (as of the date of the backup) and all of your applications fully registered etc. Regardless of what caused the problem from virus attack to corrupt files, all the way to complete hard disk failure -your image backup will take you back in time. You can simply restore to a brand new hard disk (same size or larger) and you'll be up and running.

This is primarily for OS and Apps backup rather than systematic data backup, which ideally should be kept on a separate partition or a second hard drive, although you could use the imaging software for data backup if you wished. True Image has a file by file (as opposed to image) backup mode, but I generally do not use it for that. It's also great for cloning a hard disk when you want to replace your current hard drive with a larger faster one.

Dan

https://soundcloud.com/dstong