I must say I am a member of the naive club here.

Most of my troubles had been with clothing - fabric that just doesn't hold up, pairs of pants typically last me months, not years. For quite some time I've been considering things before I buy them in relation to how long I expect them to last. I now purchase pants and shoes from stores that sell to tradesman, I purchase business laptops for personal use (my lenovo laptops are without a doubt the longest lasting and most indestructible pieces of technology I own), I build my own desktops from parts from vendors who have a history of avoiding bad capacitor suppliers and so on. Without being consciously aware of it, I've spent the past few years of my life gradually moving from mainstream purchasing behaviours to ones I expect to result in the best possible longevity of what i buy.

The Lightbulb Conspiracy has made me very concious of this process now. I'm at a point now where I'm happy with almost all the products I purchase, longevity-wise.

That said, watching that video made me absolutely livid, and I'm astounded that the ongoing degradation of quality has not been more noticeable to the general populace. Products from certain companies with bad reputations always struck me as obviously of low quality in one aspect or another, but intentionally designing them to fail brings corporations down to a whole new low. My first thought was "how is this legal?!?!", but you quickly come to realise that those who would be in a position to protect consumers from this type of behavour are most likely getting more than their fare share of the money getting thrown at bad products. Disgusting.

Ehtyar.

+1 for Security Essentials. I agree with all the other choices except for Firewall - those things generate more confusion than helpfulness, and I don't see how they help prevent infection (assuming the machine is not directly connected to the Internet, in which case you're buggered regardless).

As for rescuing the machine, I'd probably just schedule restore point creation daily or something like that. Little effort involved, and it should sort out most types of infection.

Should any businessy types come across this thread, a skim of the NSA hardening guides (page erroring at time of writing, google cache here) can provide you with some helpful nuggets.

Ehtyar.