Make your Windows machine easy to reinstall

I'm a PC, and I got myself PC in a bad state. There is a virus going around at work and I seem to have gotten it. Then when I edited my registry, I horked myself badly to the point where the only resolve was ritualistic sacrifice and rebirth.

This is the second time I've re-installed this machine and it was much simpler this time because I have a data partition that is not the same as the Windows boot partition. That way, I can keep all of the data on the data partition and blow away the operation system. Once the OS is re-installed and patched, I simply re-install all of my programs and I'm good to go.

I'd recommend this setup (at least for Windows XP):

Take your drive and carve it into two partitions when you get a new machine, a 20 GB partition for installing Windows and whatever is left for the data part of your system. Store all your files (music, movies, software, files, whatever) on the data partition. Just keep OS things on the Windows drive and treat this drive as temporary.

If there is a failure/spyware/virus/etc, then don't bother fixing it if you think it will take you longer to fix it than re-install Windows (regedit is probably the most terrifying program on a Windows machine). You can think of reinstalling Windows as your 30k mile checkup. Starting over from scratch clears all of the garbage you've aquired over the years and gives you a fresh start.

Note: I'm not going to pretend that reinstalling Windows is a trivial thing to do if you aren't in the industry, but neither is dealing with a sick Windows machine or having to buy a new computer everytime things get ugly.

While you re-install your machine, you can watch I'm a Mac ads on your laptop and wish you spent another $2k to be virus free.