Thanks for your comment, sharing your experiences with more powerful devices than mine gives me some additional insight. My sense was to hold off on buying a new laptop and in any case I will wait for now. I have found the stock indexes the most problematical, and I am in parallel using the web browser chart instead for them. It is minimalist, but it is for now preventing lockup of desktop. Hopefully a solution is being expedited, I love the company in all other ways. BTW, as I further probed into my computer it actually has a higher grade CPU than advertised on the label! Instead it has the i3-8130u which has a significantly higher single thread rating of 1951. Not sure how that happened, but I am thankful for it.
for those curious about what the CPU meter will suddenly look like. I attach a visual of what it looked like this AM. Was about to make an MES options trade, but instead that chart went crazy out of the blue and I had to sign out and reboot. Usually I can use the MES chart ok before RTH opens, apparently not today:
The title of the thread says it all: LOCKUP! When this happens the desktop software soon has a locked up main chart as well, and at times even the quotes will stop updating. Cooling fan will spin like crazy even though I have a 3 fan aux unit, not good for the CPU. Look over the whole thread and you will see it is a major problem for some of us. The only solution is to close the software and start over, best to avoid stock futures. There really needs to be a software fix asap... the CPU will be workinig at around 20% and then even with no increase in contract volatiliy or volume ... BAM, chaos on the CPU. SPX does not do this since it is just an index with no volume; at least it gives me a reference point I can use.
As I suspected, once tastyworks did a major upgrade to v1.21.1, the problems went away with no need to buy a new computer. What was key here was that I knew that some traders with extremely powerful systems were having the same problems, so I held off on new equipment. A lesson, that indeed sometimes the best thing to do with sudden software problems is to sit tight, and let the broker work it out before spending major $$! Kudos to tastyworks for solving whatever it was causing the glitches...
Thanks for the update. So the fuckers needed 6 weeks to figure out a screw up and fix it? As a minimum they should have rolled back the bad update after a week. All is well now I guess, although imagine traders upgrading their systems....