“My uncle smoked 10 packs a day and lived to be 100, go figure.”
You made me laugh out loud and wake up my husband, dammit. 
Not exactly apt, but pretty close. It is possible with good browsing and email habits to minimize the risk of getting malware (or hacked), but just like you can avoid getting sick by avoiding large crowds of people, there’s always a chance that somebody you come in contact with gets it. Sites get hacked, high profile video game websites have gotten malware uploaded on them by sneaky hackers.
Granted, getting virus programs is still just “minimizing” you can never eliminate it, but I think as much as good browsing habits brings it down, security updates, antivirus software etc help a lot more.
ETA: I personally set all my programs up to just notify, for the reasons given above about being in the middle of a program when your computer automatically reboots (or minimizes your application every 10 minutes to tell you it needs to reboot).
I set mine to update every day at 0300 for this reason.
mmm
Ok, “Francis Vaughan”, I like your comparison a lot, so I thought some more and came up with the idea to copy all your software installation disks to your HD and then have a program that monitors all your running applications and check’s them against the data from the installation disk. So when windows for example develops an error,
it simply gets the healthy file from the HD and repairs the damage. Would something like this work? I could imagine that there is no problem with disk space this days…
It wouldn’t work, there are often dependencies between program files.
You must keep rather busy updating file indices, monitoring CPU temp and adjusting fan speeds. And refreshing the dispay 60 times/second.
So, how do you know you PC isn’t part of a botnet? Some of them contain a few million machines.
For example, the conficker worm exploits a flaw in the Windows server service.
There are two parts to the answer here. In terms of monitoring the computer system for corruption - and this includes malicious corruption or modification - such systems are already in use - at least up to a point. Many virus checkers, or system integrity checkers will calculate essentially unforgeable signatures for all the critical files, and will sweep over the system periodically looking for files whose signature has changed, and flag the issue. Automatic repair is an easy next step. But as noted above, not all files are static. Some system files change of necessity, and you can’t manage damage to those this way.
However the deeper issue is I think where the concept of “flawless software” comes in. My examples earlier were probably slightly misleading, in that the examples were of damage incurred after crafting the car or plane. With software that isn’t the issue. The flaw is in the created artefact. So it is as if the plane was designed, or the manufacturing process was such that, the rivet would never be installed tight, or the car was designed so that there was always a slight flaw in the bodywork. With either the car or plane it simply doesn’t matter. But with software that slight flaw in design can turn into total system failure or security breach. It may not as well.
Cars do get recalled for sometimes apparently trivial, but possibly important safety issues. For example mine has a recall notice on it because the gasket used on the brake master cylinder is made of a material that tests have shown, that if you use an inferior brake fluid, over many years, the gasket may harden. If you use a quality fluid (get the car serviced with the dealer for instance) the problem will never arise. But there is a recall on it, and they will replace the gasket. You can imagine that, just maybe, somewhere on the planet, all the stars align for some poor owner, and they get killed because the gasket failed at exactly the wrong moment. The problem with software and security is that once the black hats work out what it takes to align those stars, they align on demand for every owner of the software. Overnight every one of millions of computers becomes vulnerable. Yet it could be from something as apparently trivial as the equivalent of a poorly fitting rivet.
Thanks for that bit too…