This post may be familiar, a couple of years ago many people on this site went to great lengths to help me solve it, but getting back to trading again it still persists... 1.6 P4 with 500 MB of memory, two 18" lcd's driven by Matrox G450 Millennium, CPU usage frequently maxes and occasionally stays maxed, freezing everything. This when bringing up just 3 charts, with time and sales via MBTrading. Something I noticed for the first time today is that when the charts are minimized(taken off the screen completely) the CPU usage drops dramatically, from an average of maybe 50% to less than ten. This cannot be normal, and I'm wondering if it's possible the Matrox card could be having a problem of some kind. In the processes nothing but MBTrading and DTNIQ(charts) show, and I'm pretty sure nothing is running in the background that could be causing it(I did a clean re-install of XP two months ago to try to avoid this very problem). Thanks.
Your kind of problem is almost always due to some application... fault with the video card is unlikely. However, Matrox has some dual display software.... If you are using it, try turning it off and just use Widows Extended Desktop to make one large display out of your two monitors. (I've got a G450, but I don't use Martrox display application.) Try a different video card?
I believe I am using Windows Extended Desktop, as the monitors are continuous(I can move things from one to the other). The only thing I can think to do is uninstall all antispyware programs - AVG, Microsoft Antispyware, Spybot and Ad-Aware, and see if this makes any difference... would one of these show up in processes if it's continuously running in the background?
I forgot to mention, DTNIQ is the culprit, with MBTrading normally using up only 10% or so of the remainder. I spoke to tech at DTNIQ, had them bring up identical charts, and their CPU usage was about 20% of mine at the same time.
Are you running the newest DTNIQ? They have a new one as of the beginning of the year. My 2.6gig P4 uses about 10% of CPU running DTNIQ, Tradestation with 650 issues in radarscreen, Dynaorder, TWS, etc. after the open. I have a Matrox card and can slide a window from one screen to the other as well.
They are probably running a faster CPU than yours. The issue is probably how many times the CPU has to redraw the charts per second. When the're maximized, the cpu is spending all its time drawing the charts (maybe there is a setting in their software that tune how many times to update the chart per second). My advice is to get a faster computer. You can have a 10 times faster computer for less than $1000. Good luck,
I am. Also, to try to narrow it down, just before the close I uninstalled all anti-viral and anti-spyware programs, with no change whatsoever in CPU usage, so if it's something running in the background I can't imagine what it might be.
U are much better off than me: I am using a Mac OS X 10.3.9 ibook with RAM upgraded to 768MB. Processor: 1.2 Ghz PowerPC G4 and my CPU is always maxed when running TWS: the applet is responsible for 90-98% of the usage. I don't know what to do to get around the problem and I think I have to buy a new PC. Let me pick up my thread and see if I can get some feedback I couldn't receive earlier.
Get a few sypware finding programs and see what all is running that you don't need. Download rootkitrevealer as well, there may be a lot of junk running that you don't know about. I have a dll that if disconnected from TWS will hang the computer at 100% usage forever. I have to kill the process from the task manager and restart it. You can google on all the processes running in the task manager and find out if some of them are unnecessary or bogus. I am not a computer tech at all but I have been through the wringer a number of times with windows machines. Basically usually the easiest and best fix is to get a new machine if yours is more than a couple of years old.