Have you tried registry/disk cleaners like CCleaner? Do you defrag your drive? Do you have millions of unused programs installed? Ubuntu builds up system detritus over time, just like Windows.
I defrag my drive on a regular basis, but it does not seem to help much. I will try CCleaner and see if that helps. And, yes, I do have a lot of unused programs installed. I will also uninstall them to see if it make any difference. Thanks for the suggestions. I would also like to thank brocklanders for the Linux suggestions. I think I am going to try running a Windows VM under Linux.
Another thing to look at when in CCleaner is, what is auto starting when you log into Windows, you'll be surprised at the amount of crap that gets auto-started.
I ran Sierra Chart under wine, couldn't read the fonts... Seriously, Linux? I wasted three months learning about Linux. I asked around on all the boards because I wanted to run my trading stuff from a thumb drive, encrypted.. after three months I realized that I could have thumb drive, or encrypted, but not both.. Three months of exploring distros, learning command line and getting bad answers on forums. I felt like I'd entered a world of sadists and I'm not sure I didn't.
This is a typical reaction, and I have (and I am) there. However, one of the things that I learned early on is that no effort is wasted. Even though you struggled, and I know this is hard to believe, the effort was imprinted in your brain and is hard won knowledge. Every time you battle with a machine this way, taking different forks on the road, experience is chalked up, and the next effort, if the courage is there, becomes much much easier. I realize that people just [want to] use computers to solve problems by clicking a mouse whenever possible, but unix requires a fine line between treating the thing in front of you like a black box, and having to wield power over it with technical knowledge. For some people the effort is not worth it, but then neither will the rewards.
You can also run msconfig and disable some of the more obvious programs... Hit Start, type "msconfig" in the box, and hit enter. When the app pops up, go to the Startup tab, and unclick everything except your mouse, audio, and networking drivers. You don't need Java update running all the time... You don't need your printer's app running all the time... You don't need anything from Adobe running all the time... You don't need Quickbooks or TaxCut running all the time... You don't need 5 different anti-virus programs installed and running all the time... You don't need all the junk the manufacturer installed at all, let alone running all the time... Save and reboot (eventually - you don't have to right away). Also consider uninstalling programs you don't use any more.... Hit Start, type "control" in the box, and hit enter. When the Control Panel folder pops up, scroll down and double-click "Programs and Features". Search and uninstall anything you don't use or don't recognize... For the advanced users, I recommend cruising through the Services and Registry and doing some cleaning/disabling. Ordinary users, don't try this as you'll probably f**k up your system. Use a real defragger like Auslogic's Disk Defrag. Free and paid versions are available on www.auslogics.com. Be sure to find and delete all the temp files first....
No... UFS, UFS2, ZFS, and even ext2/3/4 on linux etc... are not like NTFS or FAT/32 file systems on Windows. from wiki... BSD UFS and particularly FreeBSD uses an internal reallocator that seeks to reduce fragmentation right in the moment when the information is written to disk. This effectively controls system degradation after extended use. Linux ext2, ext3, and ext4: Much like UFS, these file systems employ allocation techniques designed to keep fragmentation under control at all times. As a result, defragmentation is not needed in the vast majority of cases. ext2 uses an offline defragmenter called e2defrag, which does not work with its successor ext3. However, other programs, or filesystem-independent ones, may be used to defragment an ext3 filesystem. ext4 is somewhat backward compatible with ext3, and thus has generally the same amount of support from defragmentation programs. In practice there are no stable and well-integrated defragmentation solutions for Linux, and thus no defragmentation is performed. There can be fragmentation, but usually when the disk is near full.
its not so much trading its the development of trading systems. I think linux is just easier to program on.
I do not have to do any of that on Linux, I had to on Windows. My experience with Windows 7 and previous versions is that it leaves bits and pieces of code in memory when I start and close the applications so I had to restart Windows every now and then because I was running low on memory. I also had to run utilities to defragment the disk and check the health of Registry. Like blah123... above mentioned, I had to periodically run msconfig to shutdown programs from memory that I do not need, those programs seem to appear out of nowhere, I had to be very aware of all programs that tend to start as a Windows Service when I restart Windows. I run Ubuntu for months without rebooting my laptop; sometimes I suspend it over night, sometimes not; defrag is not needed and I do not have to do any other maintenance. I hate spending my time tinkering with the OS. There was, of course, a learning curve when I started using Ubuntu but now I just use it as a "black box". I do not think I have seen any charting software running natively on Linux (charting only or for placing orders also?), however they are releasing web based software. There is a third-party charting: www.tradingview.com
Is there any way to install Windows OSes in partitions formatted as UFS, Linux ext2-3-4 etc. in order to get faster performance directly under Windows?