I wouldn't consider HP reliable. Same-day service doesn't help when they hit your doorstep 8 hours after the day session is over. Best to build/buy a reliable machine with RAID as a design principle, not an afterthought. This is a machine! http://www.swt.com/dualo7.html
Regarding the concept of having an uber trading system, my line of thinking is somewhat different, though of course it comes down to personal choice. My idea for future trading PCs (I'm not currently an active trader) would be to focus new PC purchases on being a charting/web surfing/gaming/general purpose platform, with hardware trickling down to the "trading" platform over time. I say this for a few reasons: - I think that charting is more demanding than the actual trading - I think that for security purposes, the trading platform shouldn't run anything else (aside from, say, anti-virus program) - I would prefer to use "known good" hardware for the actual trading For example, I recently upgraded my computer system to extend its life a bit. The computer is a P4 1.6 GHz running rock solid stable for 3.5+yrs at 2.1GHz, just added some more RAM, a bigger HD and a new video card (plus a much quieter case, the Antec Sonata II is sweet...). The upgrade will hopefully keep me in good shape until I'm done uni in a year, at which point I will build a new computer. The existing computer would then be nuked and become my trading system.
I have a similar machine: P4 1.6 GHz with DDR 333 memory, but I didn't overclock it. Do you think I need to add 512MB memory to make it 1.5G?
cooltrader i use a router to connect 2 pc to the cable line, could do more, but not needed. Another pc for web browsing and e-mail is connected by DSL phone line, used as backup if the cable goes down, and it does. The speed etc of a pc or pc's is mostly personal choice. I like to think i have the best car to enter a race. if i raced in a Formula 1 race at MONTE CARLO i would not show up for the race in a nascar family car to compete with "REAL" racing machines. riskarb.....yes scsi is an option. One of these machines has scsi (the older IBM). Here is my question about 15k scsi, are they reliable? I never know anyone to use one yet? Scsi even has SAS now, scsi attached sata. In answer to someones question about WHY a separate machine for entry...........i like to have charts only on one machine, entry only on another, another only for browsing, e-mail. That way if one goes down i am not out of business totally. Plus, to me it is easier to maintain or to reinstall the OS every few months. I like to reformat and do a clean reinstall about twice a year to keep a nice clean machine.
I use only one machine with comcast cable modem and am going to add a D-link router for firewall purpose. The cable connection is pretty reliable. My worry is a router may disrupt the connection sometimes especially when it's shared by multiple computers. Have you experienced reliability problems with the router? Will hardware/software firewall slow down the computer?
No problem whatsoever. I use a DLink DI624 router together with a DLink DWL2100AP access-point extension. These things require some follow-up as new firmware versions come and go. http://www.dslreports.com/forum/dlink nononsense
Well, I suppose it depends what you do with the system, but my experience has been that I was quite happy with even 512MB of RAM. I actually wanted to increase the amount of RAM specifically for gaming purposes (I just bought Battlefield 2 & Age of Empires III), so I picked up a stick of 512MB RAM when I did the recent upgrade, hoping that it would play nicely with my existing two sticks of 256MB RAM. Unfortunately it did not, though it was due to a limitation of my motherboard (Asus P4B-533), where double sided RAM sticks cannot be used in all three memory slots on the motherboard at the same time. So at this point I now have 768MB of RAM (plunked in the new 512MB stick, removed one of the old 256MB sticks), and things are humming along nicely. Both of those games I bought can be pigs at times, but they generally perform pretty well so long as I keep settings lower (I'm running a GeForce 6600GT AGP now by the way). Based on this, I am not planning to buy another stick of 512MB RAM, since I'm planning to build an entirely new PC in a year or so. So in short, if you already have 1GB of RAM, I would say that you probably don't need to expand that further. Even when I build the new PC, I will think quite seriously before considering 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB, since a dual-channel 2GB RAM kit costs nearly 3x as much as a 1GB RAM kit.