No if you are profitable and generally statisfied. Don't change a winning team. By the way you forgot to mention your style. Kind of important...
exactly. this should be the first respond to OP question. kinda shows ET's level of knowledge...2 pages of all sort of useless advises. just a couple good ones. it would depend on what you do or trying to do.if you place 2 trades a month via web browser-then even pentium 2 should be more than enough. if you trade large baskets of stocks with a lot of calculations,streaming data processing or heavy backtesting on tick data-even 6 cores might not be enough
FWIW, DSL is rarely a primary alternative these days. For starters, you rarely get the advertised speed that the provider states since it's dependent on how far you are in wire miles from the central office you're connected with. It's usually more expensive in data rate/dollar, if not absolute price, compared with FIOS or a cable modem. If either of those are available in your area you should look into it.
I have the internet open & NinjaTrader with 5 charts & the DOM. I day trade NQ futures, but I don't scalp (an occasional one here & there). I usually hold for minutes, not seconds.
When I'm watching my charts from NinjaTrader-ZenFire I have a timer on the bottom that counts down the seconds until the bar is completed. Often when it gets down to about 5 or 6 seconds it just jumps to the next bar all of a sudden. It's like I have a 5 or 6 second lag or something. Is that normal? If not, how would I go about fixing it? I'm not too much of an expert on computers. Here are my specs: Verizon DSL "rated to" 3 Mbps Download Speed. SpeedTest says: Ping, 51ms, 1.44 Mbps Download, 0.48 Mbps Upload Windows XP 2 GB Memory Intel Core 2 6300 @ 1.86 GHz 400 GB Hard Drive Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT
I use timers also and for me this is a problem of the computer clock, which is what my timers use, not being synched with the data vendor clock. Thus, I synch my computer clock to an atomic clock server every morning as part of my routine. If your timer uses the data vendor's clock, this solution would not apply.
It does look like the computer is missing some data because either the network connection is not fast enough, or that the computer itself is not fast enough to process the data and turn it into a chart display. The Speedtest result should be close to what the vendor sold you. If the vendor said download speed is 3Mbps then your test result should be close. (But it looks like you only get half of that.) If you are connected via wireless (wifi) from your computer to the DSL modem or router, try to use wired connection. Contact Verizon DSL tech support and report the observed slow speed and ask them to investigate. Who knows... sometimes maybe someone had downgraded your service level by mistake?