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Strategies & Market Trends : NetCurrents NTCS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: intothefray3 who wrote (6720)	4/1/2001 2:56:45 PM
From: Andriy Turhovach	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8925

If you have the luxury of dedicating this one computer to trading activity and nothing else I would recommend the following: 1. Don't load anything on there other than those programs you use for trading related activity. 2. Especially do not load any anti-virus programs, 3rd party utilities such as Norton's various offerings (Nothing against Norton by the way). 3. Use Windows 2000 as your operating system. 4. DSL or cable as your means to connect to whoever it is you're connecting to. 5. You didn't mention graphics card. I would make sure I had the biggest, meanest, and fastest graphics card available. Amazing how much better charting apps run with really good graphic cards. 6. You also didn't mention monitor. 17" Flat Panel displays are really nice but expensive. If you must use a CRT, then a 19" with a high refresh rate would be my ideal. Multiple monitors would be the next better ideal, but I suppose thats a personal kind of thing. 8. If you upgrade anything, then spend the money on additional RAM. The processor speed is more than sufficient. 9. Develop good maintenance rituals, ie, run ScanDisc, Defrag etc. I'm sure there are a bunch of other suggestions others will make. Good luck...

To: intothefray3 who wrote (6720)	4/1/2001 6:11:21 PM
From: Magnatizer	Respond to of 8925

krasmusson An essential part of my trading machine is not in the box... it is the APC backup power supply. If my power goes out I have 20-30 min of backup to do what I need to do. ht Mag

To: intothefray3 who wrote (6720)	4/2/2001 1:58:37 AM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8925

Kevin, I'm pretty much of the same mind as the other replies. CPU speed you indicated will be fine. Since you seem to be seeking the most in performance, put some time into hard drive selection - make sure you use a modern hard drive with high spindle speed and transfer rate. All this stuff is so cheap these days. If you have a few extra bucks, get two drives and run your charting / data collection on the second drive. I guess what you use really depends on what kind of trading you are doing. I've sat on my couch and used the generally lousy LiveCharts to make money on a laptop, so its not just computing horse power that makes it all work. I guess the bare minimum advice - 256 or better yet 512MB RAM - Windows 2000. Don't consider anything else. - Quality modern graphics card - Suitable display - Some method of backing things up. I back up my systems to other machines on my network plus my network has a DAT tape drive on it. At minimum have some way of backing up any critical hard-to-replace data. My setup? Pretty plain by most current standards: -PIII 450Mhz, 512MB RAM, two hard drives - middle of the road graphics card, 16MB RAM on it. I'm thinking that it may be what is behind some jitter issues I'm noting on Tradestation that I did not note when I was running it on my very modern laptop, so I think I'll replace it and see. - Windows 2000. Ran Windows NT on this machine for years as well. - 10/100 ethernet to my network where I have a proxy server/shared access to cable modem - Tradestation 2000i / eSignal - 1 single ViewSonic 21" P810 monitor I mostly just use the one box for charting and order entry. Each TS workspace itself has either 4 or 9 charts on it. Since I only intraday trade ES and NQ, its not a hardship. Cheers Michael