Guys - I just wanted to provide a small endorsement of a piece of software I've been testing and trialing for a few weeks now. I'm posting in this forum because the software section seems pretty dead, and this software is geared to data-intensive applications...like index futures trading platforms. The software automatically increases the windows priority of your trading platform, Excel, or any other program you are using for trading. Yes, you can use the Task Manager in Windows to do this, but this program does it for you even after rebooting. The other thing that's impressive: you can lower the priority of non-trading apps like Internet Explorer, Snag-it, etc., but it will "boost" them in priority when they are needed....pretty impressive. The programmer who wrote this is very sharp, but the docs are terrible, and the user interface is confusing at best. If you buy this program, contact me for how to set-up your workstation. I spent 2 weeks figuring it out. I'm now running a Java-based trading application and it just screams now. I can't help but thinking this program would really help a "CPU hog" like Tradestation. It's at http://www.prioritymaster.com (Note: Tell Ted I sent you)
Good to see another software trinket for Windows - it might sometime approach the capabilities of *nix. "nice" and "renice" have been around for a long time - probably 25 years or more.
Solaris (free, too) even has a realtime scheduler. Designed for that and SMP, from day one. Realtime Java is coming, too.
Good points all. Amazing that Microsoft never thought to incorporate the functionality of PriorityMaster into Win/XP or even Win/Vista.