Things will definitely fail and we can't guarantee system availability without a detailed Reliability analysis of all parts in the PC. However it can be guaranteed that something will fail. The easiest way to get around all this is to not plan for redundancy in the desktop system but rather plan regular backup of the source and data to online storage. (Maybe twice daily). You can use Amazon's services which is quite feature rich. This way even if something fails, you can upgrade to available hardware without breaking a sweat. You will not be at the mercy of hardware/software vendors. And Oh, yes, use GNU/Linux. We are based in India and can build the system for you if you want. - www.rknowsys.com

Option-1: Start with contributing to an Free software proj. This also has the added advantage of choosing which platform you want to start with. Eg. if you want to go for desktop apps, try GNOME, KDE. if you want to go into web apps - look at Java, J2EE, php apps on sourceforge. You can look at rubyforge for contributing to RoR projs. Once you have decent experience, you can showcase this and get a decent job. You can count this experience in addition to your test experience. Option-2: Apply to smaller less established firms or even some of the large Indian IT firms - TCS, Infosys, wipro. They should consider your application. You can mention during the interview that you are looking to get into development as soon as possible. They might start you on testing but move you to development soon. Indian cos. are flexible that way.