Cannot be a spyware, virus... The original poster said that "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." That by itself means that the culprit IS drawing the graphs and nothing else. Get a new machine man... Good luck,
This is what I'm thinking at this point, although there is one last thing I'm going to investigate, i.e. defective memory. The fact that the memory usage on my machine doesn't fluctuate much at all, even for brief periods, someone found puzzling. I have never seen more than 50% of it being used, ever. One other thing occured to me just now. The version of Windows XP I'm using has been tweaked by IBM. I'm wondering if they perhaps made some small change that has created this problem.
Try changing the display color depth. If you are running 32 bit color depth, you can switch down to 16 bit. You are not going to see any difference, but that may have a significant affect on CPU usage.
This is a long shot idea but I once had a problme with high cpu usage running Tradestation. I tracked it down to Mcaffee antivirus that was monitoring each and every file in TS as it was being called. Imagine scanning 700 symbols constantly each and every time it was updated for each tick. I got rid of it and put on Norton's antivirus. Go and check the processs to see if the antivirus u are using is being used a lot. Sort the cpu usage and see how much it pops to the top. If a lot then you can tell anitvirus software not to bother with certain files. Tell it to ignore your trading software. I have not read this entire thread so forgive me if this has already been mentioned. John
Thanks to everyone who has tried to help with this... I'm going to share one last thing, which may or may not mean anything, and if I can't solve it in the next day or so then upgrade to an Athlon 64. I ran the complete diagnostic test on it this afternoon, and when looking at what it said about the memory I found two things that seemed curious, and which hopefully someone will be able to explain. 1) External Cache - component not detected in system(cpu is in protected mode - unable to test) 2) Extended ram - installed - 521920kb available - 0kb(as reported by bios) Do either(or both) of these things mean anything? Thanks. Alan
this does not look like a hardware failure. try look at the windows task manager: 1. press control-alt-del, the windows task manager will pop up 2. click the performance tab. look at the following numbers: Physical Memory - Total: That's the amount of memory you have Commit Charge (k) - Peak: That's the largest amount of memory you have ever used at the same time. (current session only) If your Peak is larger than your Total, you need more memory. In the old day, when memory were expensive, we use the harddisk to make virtue memory. With the price of memory now a days, and the amount of tasks you need your computer to do, and the amount of your trading money at stake, skimming on memory is foolhardy. 3. Next, click on the Processes tab. then click on the CPU column heading. THis will sort your processes in CPU usage order. You can then see which process is taking up most of your CPU time. you can google the Image name to find out the purpose of that process. of course, before you do any of the above, you should always first do a virus check and a spyware check.
I tried this a couple of years ago and it solved my high CPU usage caused by QCharts on a 2GHz machine: Goto System Properties, Advanced, Performance Options. Click on the Advanced tab and change memory usage from "Programs" to "System cache". HTH.
Thanks. I just did this, and it appears this may have helped the problem. I am definitely seeing less cpu usage(averaging about 15% versus previous 50%), but will have to watch for some time, because when this thing really gets pegged and freezes up is during periods of extreme volume. Assuming the problem is fixed... 1) Why would this setting change the amount of cpu usage? 2) Might it still not indicate that there might be some sort of hardware problem?