Hi Dennis,
I've been there. The best you can do is bookmark the LiveCharts applet load page on the quote.com site, *and* the one you can access from the fast.quote.com site. They're just different packaging for the same thing. Then try them both until you get the one that's working at the moment. The more crowded the servers get, the worse your luck is going to be.
Of course I'm assuming things haven't changed much in the last month and a half since I upgraded to QCharts. I was paper trading with that setup and delayed quotes and there were often delays, glitches, outages, etc. I used that "feature" as part of my training! <rueful grin>
Right now I'm running daily and 1-minute charts for the DOW and NASDAQ Composite, plus daily and 1-minute charts and a time and sales window for whichever stock in my portfolio I want to view at the moment. The portfolio is displayed in a quote sheet showing all the current data on a bunch of stocks and selected options. This is just one of several workspaces I can switch between with a hotkey.
Everything updates in real time and I've had next to *NO* outages in the month or so since I set it up. <knock on silicon>
I'm using Windoze 98 on a 350 Mhz Pentium II with 128 Megs RAM with a 56k modem dialing into my ISP at only 28.8. I've got 56k access through my backup ISP but I don't seem to need it. Processor speed is *not* a big issue. QCharts, although it's a windows app, is really not that demanding on the hardware. Buy the biggest monitor you can afford, though!
Just for peace of mind, be sure you've got redundancy in as many parts of your setup as possible. Having two monitors, or two complete systems, another phone line, backup ISP (or two), and a UPS for everything is not too much, IMHO. I'm not totally there yet, but I'm working on it.
It pains me to see the problems you're having with LiveCharts. You're justified in being put off by that. On the other hand, they've hit a home run with the QCharts service.
Good luck making up your mind, and I hope things improve for you in any case.
Mike |
