I saw this poll on a programming community board and am interested to compare it to the trading community.
This is the result of the other poll. This was from the trading comunity codeproject.com Option % Yes, for all sites 48.0 Yes, for sites with obnoxious advertising 12.8 Yes, except for a few select sites 15.3 I used to, but no longer 3.9 No, but am planning to 3.0 No and have no plans to 17.1 Responses 1113
I use my trading machine for nothing but to trade. Fortunately, I use a private T-1 for trading activity. Even if I had to trade over the internet, I would configure the router to only accept packets from the trading firm's network and block out everything else. It is worth while at the current prices of computers to dedicate a machine for trading only and surf on another separate machine. Naturally, you must make sure that the trading machine and the surfing machine never interact (share directories, files, etc). Best of luck.
I agree with FT71's sage advice. There is no real reason why you should not have a dedicated trading computer. Todays prices/power make that achievable. http://www.tradingcomputers.com/index.html and of course http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/workstations?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd And dont forget about the eyes http://reviews.cnet.com/Monitors/4521-6529_7-5021402-3.html?tag=subnav I have 4 1905's and I would recommend without hesitation. And no I dont own Dell stock. If you cant afford the $$$ for Point to Point line, then at the very least configure your router as FT suggested and TRADE ONLY on that machine. No porn, no email, no music, no nothing. For surfing, Ive had no ad problems with ZA and pop up stopper(free edition).
well i now have a router and a software firewall set to "tight" security. before this my box got infected with "smitfraud/psguard" and it was hell getting it clean. if anyone needs help with "fixing" this problem let me know because it is the toughest i have experienced. on a side note i had a little fun with psguard's visa processing.
For a discount solution, you can have one PC that is dedicated to trading only, and the same PC also have games, movies and whatever else you want. You just have two different hard drives, and you switch between them. Of course, there's the small inconvience of having to reboot each time, but if you set it up yourself, it's pretty cheap. There's also somebody who sells a switch to do this. It's what I do. I have my main PC that's pretty studly, and a less powered one for backup (to be used to bail out of positions if my trading PC keels over). If I want to play around, or try some new program or whatever, I close down my trading PC, switch drives, and fire it back up. Now I can run more dangerous things without impacting my trading.
Interesting. I never thought of that. So you only have one drive connected at a time so that nothing can transfer the infection from one drive into the other. Great idea.
99% of pop ups are pointless ads, worse though, they are resource intensive, often slowing down my system for no apparnt reason at important times.
You need to remember that even thought the Ad Blocking software might prevent the ad from showing on your machine you may still be using as much (or more) of your machine's resources and bandwidth by receiving the ad and blocking it locally. One of the solutions to getting around having the ad sent to your local machine at all is to have a web accelerator that filters out adverts at the accelerator's server and so the ads never come down the wire to you at all. This means that you don't use the bandwidth or local resources to block ads. Your current solution might even slow down your machine more...