"I like the low commissions with IB and I don't need hand holding. But the fact that TWS crashes within 10 minutes of starting it *every time* and the fact that IB apparently has no fix for this is forcing me to look for another broker. Does anybody have recommendations for a low cost, *reliable* broker? I trade equities and options and might someday be trading futures." Lightspeed Trading also charges per share. I have not used them.
I agree with most other posters. If there is a gripe with IB it's not the stability of their software. rew, your problem sounds like your machine runs out of memory. Advice from ids should help or you might be running to many applications on the same computer. If neither works, see if you can reduce the number of simultaneously open windows in TWS, especially time and sales, charts and market depth. Besides tiny difference in commissions and size limits on foreign exchange orders, the only reason to change from IB is high intraday margin on futures.
IMO, the highest the margin the more serious the firm is. Bucket shops offer high leverage beause they take the opposite side.
This may be related to your video card and associated software. Certain conflicts are possible there that can cause freezing.
I have 8 gigs on XP x64 also. No problems here. It sounds like a hardware problem. Run a memory/cpu test on your machine.
A professional trader will have the following at a minimum: dedicated PC for trading (some will have seperate analysis (charting etc) and order entry machines) dedicated line for trading - this will not be a retail broadband connection Your issue is related to your specific machine, not IB as others have pointed out. There is no advantage to running a 64-bit operating system for order entry. Go back to 32-bit and run nothing else on your machine. If there are still issues it is likely a hardware problem. Try on another machine.
I am going to investigate the possibility that there is something wrong with the video card that is causing the freeze ups. Given that other people with similar configurations aren't having the problems I am this seems like the most likely cause of the problem.
I had the same TWS crashes on a windows 7 PC. After I moved to 32 bit java and increases memory allocated to TWS (there were directions in another ET post) it went away.
Well I have TWS memory set to 1024M, which should be enough. As I said, I think it's probably a hardware issue so I'm going to try swapping in some new stuff.