If used heavily, sooner or later a PC turns into a snail, and I don’t mean the nice gastropod featured in the game Snails by PDA Mill, which I installed on my Pocket PC and Smartphone thanks the special offer reserved to Pocket PC Thoughts subscribers.
That’s to say I’m in the middle of a complete hardware upgrade. In the building of the new workstation I took particular care of two aspects: a fast mass storage subsystem, the real bottleneck of modern PCs, by installing two Barracudas in RAID-0 mode, and a quality Chieftec case providing a good internal ventilation and most importantly silence through the use of quiet fans. 8)
The next step has been the installation of the Windows XP Pro operative system and the software I daily use, each one with its customizations, a procedure that’s time consuming if done properly.
This time however it has been easier thanks to Raxco’s FirstDefense ISR and PerfectDisk, the first one useful for testing drivers and applications without messing with the main snapshot and the second one to keep the Barracudas defragmented. 🙂
And speaking about useful tools to improve productivity, I’m happy since I’ve finally found a text editor with great general features and full Unicode support, EmEditor, useful to edit the language files of Ecpc. Even better is the fact that it’s free for academic and technical use, which includes shareware authors. Thanks to Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft for his policy and as you can read in the Ecpc Wishlist page now I recommend his software to translators. 😉
Update: since at Raxco they’re happy that PerfectDisk v7.0 just won the 2005 Redmond Magazine’s Readers Choice Award for the “Best Disk Defragmentation Tool” they’re offering a 25% discount off their products with the promo code REDMOND25 that they invited me to share. 😉