If used heavily it for daily work or leisure, sooner or later your PC will turn into a snail, and I don’t mean the nice gastropod featured in the game Snails by PDA Mill, which I’m enjoying on my Pocket PC and on my Smartphone since I got it 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 main aspects: a fast mass storage subsystem, the real bottleneck of modern powerful PCs, by installing two nice 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.
The next step has been the installation of the operative system Windows XP Pro and all the software I use daily, each one with its customizations, a procedure I really hate because it’s really 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 well defragmented.
And speaking of useful tools to improve one’s own productivity, I’m happy since I’ve finally found a text editor with great general features and full Unicode support, EmEditor, very 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. I’m thankful to Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft for his policy and as you can read in the Ecpc Wishlist page now I recommend his software to my translators.

Update: since at Raxco they’re very happy that PerfectDisk v7.0 just won the 2005 Redmond Magazine’s Readers Choice Award for the “Best Disk Defragmentation Tool” they’re giving their users a 25% discount off their products with the promo code REDMOND25 which they invited me to share with you.