With large screen prices going down. Has anybody experimented with consolidating their PC's into a single monitor then dividing it up into virtual screens. I am not talking virtual desktops that you flip around via tabs, but actually dividing up screen real estate into sections that represent a different PC hardware config. The health care industry, which uses more advanced display technology, has already done this. Makes sense, no? Pls post pictures of your setups or tech links. For example. an enabling technology is "Virtual KVM(s)" http://synergy-project.org/
I worked with a loser trader who used 8 screens. I never want to be like him so I use a single 32 inch apple monitor for my windows PC. Has worked reasonably well for 5 years. I have been thinking of writing a scroller that would expand the desktop space to 2x2x32inch. But never got round to it yet.
We agree then. Simplicity is the key. However, I do think that 1-3 medium grade PC's is better than a top of the line system. In practice, many applications conflict with resource allocation on a single PC. You can run virtualized environments. But, the severe (imagined?) computing overhead doesn't gel with me. There is process control software that enhances windows Task Manager. However, almost everything is mission critical during trading hours.
If it make more money with 3 pc's then use 3 pc's. I auto trade, manual trade, forex trade, stock trade, play world of tanks, go on forum, shop at amazon. No problems on a 10 year old diy built pc. I don't like noise, don't like heat, don't like using electricity, don't like complexity, don't like too many buttons to press. So 1 pc works for me. If it didn't, I could make it so that it does. The only thing that would tempt me to change is a bigger monitor. 40/50/60 inch LED/OLED monitor could come in handy. If they do a super wide curved monitor, I'd probably jump on it.
Thats incredible, Joe. Are all of these applications web-based? Including auto trade? It only takes TWS and twsdde to dog any medium grade PC.
Joe doesn't trade so pay him no mind. I run two monitors; one on a bootcamped mac (win7 and OS X) and one on a win7 box. I run both under windows while trading. Excel on one screen and execution on the other. I typically boot into OS X when the trading day is done to do banking, email, etc. I am not a chartist so I have no input into the 40 windows displaying essentially the same data.
Web, Java, Windows .Net, Unix, MT4, I use all kinds. I disable everything I don't need on windows. So it only runs the stuff I use and it's pretty quick. I don't know what TWS is. If it's slow you have to find out why it's slow. Maybe it's disk-bound, or internet-bound. Look in the task manger and see what is taking all the CPU. Also a lot of stuff come with auto-update enabled. So they spend all day trying to do non-existent updates. This may not work for others, I don't use an antivirus, but I do use a firewall to stop windows phoning home all day long. I know when I have a virus. So I only scan when I need to, which is once every 5 years.
As long as you have enough cores available it's not going to make a significant difference. Additionally, once you have over 16GB of RAM, there's just no effective difference actually occurring past that point. Pull up task manager. See that section that says "cached?" That's all the left over memory being used for the file system cache - which means one has enough memory. Also, if you're not maxing out all cores, you're not CPU bound for the most part.