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keep a drive, disk partition or even a flash drive that you can boot from as your "clean room" which you set up with all of your tool set ready to go. It's kind of the same thing as the recovery disc or partition that a manufacturer will give to you with a new box. Become intimate with Task Manager and the processes tab, keep it open in one of your monitors if you have more than one, otherwise keep referring to it as much as you can in your normal workflow, definitely use HiJackThis often and become familiar with what is normal for your computer. Use MSConfig to make sure you have a handle on what is being loaded when you start up every day. Study and know how Registry works, is used and how it is formatted so you can alter or recognize altered keys when necessary.
Oh... and keep your data on a separate drive or at least separate partition than your OS and programs when possible.
I have an few XP boxes a couple of Win7 laptops and a Vista setup and on my newest Win7 I am running Security Essentials with HiJackThis ready to go. I run AVG on all the others as well an keep them all up to date automatically and also manually on the regular.
This setup and knowledge has helped me prevent any major issues with all of them because I am able to recognize errant processes in Task Manager pretty quickly, squelch browser hijack attempt, and just generally keep the machines running good. If any thing has gotten out of hand, I at least I have had a clean setup to restore to (ghost the backed up "clean room" info to c:\) many malicious viruses attack c:/ or boot sector so keep ing your data separate can help prevent loss of your work....
hmmm... probably rambling on too long... but that works for me and it helps pre-diagnose other people's computers because I can see what is normal right away, ask about things they may have that I don't recognize and locate unusual things very quickly...
often times msconfig - startup is overloaded with startup programs and HiJackThis will have many of the browser "spyware" calls in it. Run those in safe mode and "fix" anything that should not be there or is not to your liking. That will usually speed up a computer very nicely...
Format c:/ is the last last, very last, did I say last yet? resort but if you have things set up properly, even that won't be that traumatic and you get a nice new shiny OS working like it used to again for a while. It can be fun, like rolling the clock back to when you were younger and things were simpler but with all the knowledge you have now!
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