I recently upgraded a six year old dell dimension P4 to 1 gig memory and a new 160 gig hard drive. I installed XP Pro and all that's on it are Ninja and QT. The box flies. I know guys buying new boxes and mine boots in seconds and runs twice what theirs does. I think XP Pro has a lot to do with it. I'm now looking at my HP laptop. Getting a little sluggish and wondering if it's the same kind of animal to upgrade. Only going to run Ninja on it but there's a bunch of other stuff on there. Little reluctant to clear the hard drive, install a new one and start all over on this one so, for now, just thinking of starting with memory...going from 1 gig to 2 gigs. It's an HP pavillion DV5220US with an Intel Centrino Duo running XP Media. Was not bought for trading but it's been doing fine...so far. Wondering if the memory upgrade will make a dent given this processor [T2050 1.60 GHz] as I'm not "up" on all the new stuff. Thanks all, V.
Adding RAM from 1G to 2G on XP generally does almost nothing for performance. Check your Task Manager when your trading apps are loaded and see how much physical RAM is being used.
Thanks Scataphagos. Just did a market replay of Thursday's open with Ninja, along with QT and one browser open. Averages about 5% CPU Usage and 350,000 Physical memory available. Opened Outlook and ran a Youtube vid just as a test and CPU averaged 10% with Physical around 335,000 with CPU spikes to 30%. With just QT and NT at the open, its around 379,000 and <5% cpu. Thanks again. V.
Sounds like 1G of RAM is plenty for you with that setup. Doing a fresh install of the OS would likely help your performance... especially if you can avoid installing all of the media and other apps which typically come on such machines.