If something works and makes profit, you want to upgrade it ? Isn't it less risk to not mess with it, especially if you know little about computers as is the case with the OP ? For someone like you who has profits coming out of there ears, you can afford the risk. For most people, they are not in that situation.
profits? who said anything about profits? if not for ebt, obamacare, and Jack Hersheys immense generosity, I'd be living out of a cardboard box.
It seems that a lot more of the programs need more resources on the computers thesedays, hence the need for the upgrade - ExpereincedJoe is right!!! worked for a number of years - was totally happy with the setup, so have not really needed to contemplate changing till now. Thanks everyone for their suggestions....Much appreciated...
I would say RAM is by far more important than anything... then CPU then SSD. Really depends on your trading software. Sierra Charts seems to not require too much but others like NinjaTrader if you have many charts open and some browser windows open, you might want more than 8GB (12 or 16). You don't really want your RAM getting near full usage, I know if you read about it on the internet they say that windows manages memory differently in the OSes newer than XP, so that it is not reliable to look at the usage (I mean they say that it looks more full than it is) - BUT - in my experience, my system would slow down when I was getting near 8GB (like 7GB usage I guess), so I moved to 16 and the system works much better. Since 16GB is cheap enough these days there seems to be not much a reason not to get the full 16 on desktop or notebook. For CPU intel core i5 or core i7 SSDs are great too, they are also not so expensive these days Hard to advise about OS though, I know some people like win7 - windows 8 was very super stable for me - win 8.1 has some nice features but I had various problems that I had to fix with it. Other oses won't run most trading software so unless your platform is java, I would stick to windows. Also, mostly because I was just dealing with this... if you get bored and like to watch flash videos in your browser while trading when the market is perhaps not so active, be aware that chrome's built in flash doesn't seem to really use hardware acceleration - well for some reason it eats a ton of cpu. If you disable in chrome://plugins pepperflash which is chrome's version and install the latest from adobe then cpu usage is much less.
My 2-yr old Acer is the worst POS I have ever owned--almost rivals my Compaq back in the 90s. On the contrary, my Asus laptop is a marvel.
I would avoid Windows 8.2... worst POS since Vista (maybe worse). my laptop crashed a few months ago, so I got a new one w/ 8.2. total crap. it turns out this new HP laptop doesn't have the drivers available to convert it to Windows 7. I will probably end up buying another laptop w/ 7 and just use the 8.2 laptop for web surfing and a paperweight. then again, maybe the day traders are running Linux or something else in, which case, disregard this rant.
It's totally off the wall. Where's the OG start button, damnit? I am not alone in my hatred of 8.2. Google it. Many may try to argue against personal preference, but to do so is an ego stroke as there is a critical mass of Windows 8.2 haters. I don't wish to get into a debate about personal preferences only to warn others that 8.2 is *****like nothing else.***** Try it on someone else's computer before buying. User function sucks. It does not grow on you. Buyer beware.
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