lakooz, I wish to know if some of you is able to run TWS on P2 300 mhz and 128 ram computer. If your operating system is Win95, Win98, or WinMe you shouldn't have any problem (although I recommend you keep running any other programs down to a bare minimum). If your operating system is NT or Win2000 you're pushing the upper boundaries and you will probably have a bit of disk churning.
The IB TWS will run on much less memory and speed than that. Especially the stand-alone version. It really doesn't take much resources. Richard
That's right IB standalone even works (badly) on a P133 with 32 MB (!!!). I use this as my back up of backup computer.. Over careful ? well.. maybe.. still no worry with your configuration. if you have only IB running (I doubt it) all you need is any Pentium computer with 64MB. If you have more programs to run (charting, analysis, browser etc...) then 128MB is the way to go as a minimum which is very usable. Obviously the more programs you use at the same time the more memory you need. However, you may improve your computer systems with a couple of tools.. Win95/98 systems use this : http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/cb.htm select the 'game setting' it will improve your system performance a lot, because Windows will use less memory for unnecessary things for trading. A computer is multipurpose, but the default settings of the OS are not friendly to applications for traders. You dont need a big disk cache for instance, you need maximum memory for chart analysis etc.. Win95/98/NT/2000 systems might consider this tool too : http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/maxmem.htm this is a memory defragmenter. A similar tool exists for your hard disk. Fragmented memory is very very bad for traders because we usually analyse massive continuous data (charts) with complex component based applications. This defragmenter will help a lot for systems with 128MB and less. It removes unnecessary program code from active memory and leave more space to your trading application. Usually a trader starts up his programs and they stay there for hours. Programs loaded by the system are less used and take up unnecessary space. 128MB is enough for IB standalone version (I even run several IB sessions with this amount of memory. I do use the tools mentioned above. BTW they are 100% free, not even adware. I really recommend them). neo
neo, I even run several IB sessions Not sure what you mean by this. I thought IB would not allow multiple logons (and without a logon, how do you have a session?) Please explain. BTW, thanks for the link to MaxMem. Had been using a program called RamPage but this looks more interesting.
IB JTWS (the java version, now the only one to use) allows you several sessions on the same machine with different accounts. indeed you can not login on 2 machines or even the same with the same account ID. ie open one IB with stocks-options account and another one with futures account. each IB is totally separated, settings are saved for each account ID etc... This works great. You can do it with either the standalone (better) or web started version. neo