Concurred. Memory leakage. Improper "heap management" is the formal school term. More commonly known as "oops, I forgot...". Especially computer software written by not-quite-professionals. Over time, allocated memories are not properly released which cause resource contention. I run Win 7 with 6GB RAM (desktop) and 8GB RAM (laptop)... I still face memory depletion issue. I think one of the major reasons is these days websites/webpages got a lot of advertisements (video) and animation stuff. Java, Adobe Flash, whatever technologies they use... these "stuffers" (I called them) are the culprits most of the time IMO in hogging up system resources. Not your trading platform. Unless you absolutely don't use your trading box for the Internet... At any rate, I just routinely reboot my computers pretty much daily.
Some people leave their computers on all/most of the time. Shutting down during off hours (or rebooting once per day) takes care of some possible problems, especially this one. I do the same.
I understand for a laptop or travel machine but I can not understand how people mix personal/internet with trading machines. These things are so cheap these days... Why not pick up an old P4 machine to YouTube with rather than muck up your trading box...
That is the best solution to keeping you trading machine clean of crapola and as fast as it can be. (That said, I'm guilty of mixing myself.... just for convenience.... but I'm also a "back-up fanatic"... such that if surfing and/other tasking leads to my rig being compromised, I can restore with minimal hassle... that is if I get fouled, my trading can be functionally restored in about 10 minutes. That said, my rig has NEVER been fouled such that I "must restore right now"... in spite of my surfing and other multi-tasking activities. Still, it would be best to keep one's trading/data/charting apps separate from all others.) You CAN use your trading rig for "all purposes" if it's convenient (if you're diligent about keeping your AV up to date and if you have a router firewall, your risk of becoming corrupted isn't all that great)... but you still should be prepared to have your rig corrupted and be able to restore quickly.