Here's what my crappy work ssd looks like after a few years of windows 7 and visual studio: ssdlife report Runs like brand new and visual studio is able to max out the cpu when compiling. When I switched to it from the old spinning rust, the build time dropped from 50+ minutes to around 15. Just like a lot of electronics these days, it seems that if it doesn't crap out on you in the first couple of weeks it'll be fine.

Spoiler: They're all in the javascript. (Select the black blob to read the spoiler.)

I really hate how terms from construction bleed into software development. No! you aren't an "Architect". You aren't a "Design engineer". I've been named an architect and I have to deal with it - In my views the "Architect" is responsible for the technical direction that the project is taking and must maintain a vision of the entire system and plan technical items accordingly so that you don't end up with a mess of unmaintainable spaghetti. He is also responsible for dealing with management and explaining design decisions to the bean counters and time planners. But most importantly, I think the architect must follow his or others design decisions in code, be extremely competent technically and up-to-date with all SW dev. trends(and bullshit) and have the domain knowledge needed for making competent technical decisions. If the architect doesn't code, doesn't keep current on SW dev. practices(or even lacks knowledge on well establised practices), and only sits inside a UML tool then he most likely is producing negative value for the team. Unfortunately, life isn't this simple or idealistic and there's loads of "architects" out there that should be taken out back and shot. But there's also loads of developers out there that do what a real architect would do for a project that simply aren't recognized. Oh and it doesn't matter what you think an architect should do, it's what management thinks that matters. :)

The one I'm working on is about 2 million C++ 500k C and about 500k java. This was about a year ago, checked with cloc[^]

I think git fits the bill perfectly for you.It's a distributed VCS wich means every CLONE of the repository IS the repository(contains all history and code).Once you COMMIT a changeset to one of your clones you can PUSH it to any repository to wich you have access(say your usb stick for example).If you also want your code to be backed up online, assembla.com offers free private Subversion and Git repos.

wxWidgets + language of choice.that should work well enough down to even windows 3.1.