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Gold/Mining/Energy : Day trading in Canada -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quickcat who wrote (4008)	3/26/2000 9:56:00 PM
From: keith massey	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4467

Quickcat... This is the place to talk about trading systems. For a new system I would recommended Windows 2000 or NT as the operating system... stability is a must in this game. I have already upgraded to W2K and love it. Processor... It depends if you are going to play high end video games (I don't) or are going to use the computer for TA scanning (e.g. Metastocks, etc.). If you are using it for scanning you are going to need some power behind your system. For the most power at the cheapest price you can go with a dual Celeron system. Throw in 2 Celeron 500's and you have yourself a computer with the power of a PIII 800 for 1/5th of the price. You have to buy a motherboard that supports Duals (e.g. BP6 ABIT DUAL SOCKET 370 440BX - $215) and use NT or W2K has your operating system Or go with a PIII 600+ to make it easier. Of course you could go with a AMD and some people swear by them but I have never liked the product (no razing please<g>) If you are not going to use the computer for scanning and don't intended on playing any high end video games than you can just throw in a cheaper processor and won't see the difference for trading. Hard Drive... In my opinion speed is more important than pure size. For the ultimate in power you can go with a SCSI hardrive but this will set you back a fair amount of money and unless you are using it for high end scanning/TA you will see little difference. I would just go with a good size (13-20GIG) and make sure it is 7200 RPM drive and not 5400 RPM. I personally would recommend the Diamond Max. Plus 20.5GB (7200RPM) with 2MB Buffer Hard Drive for around $275... very fast and reliable. Monitors... Screen space, not quality, is the most important issue for trading. For the cost of a good 15" IBM you can get a 19" KDS ($450). Sure the colours are not as sharp but try and fit 9 charts on a 15" monitor. I would look at getting at least 2 and possibly 3 monitors if you can afford it. If you get three monitors you might want to spend that little extra on your primary monitor which you will be using all the time and buy really cheap ones for the other two. Video cards. A few people have been taking about the Matrox cards and I did a little digging. Turns out the Matrox G400 has been getting very good reviews. You throw one of these in you system ($240) and you can plug in 2 monitors. They have 16-32M on the board so memory is not an issue. Or throw in 2 cards and have 4 monitors. If you are buying separate cards make sure you check with the manufacture to make sure they work together. At a minimum I would only buy cards for the same manufacture and hope for the best. All my Diamonds (5 at one time but now only 4) have all worked together fine. I just added a Stealth III to my system and had problems until I upgraded to Windows 2000 and them I didn't have a glitch. RAM - minimum 128M PC-100. If you are doing an serious scanning go with 256M. That is just some random thoughts off the top of my head.... feel free to ask questions. Best Regards KEITH