I used to use radarscreen from Tradestation and loved it. It allows you to write a strategy and scan taht strategy against thousands of stocks. The stocks that meet your criteria are alerted. I am looking for a program like that since I do not use tradestation anymore. Any help would be appreciated.
Take a look at NeoTicker. They're not bad for real time scanning but I find it works best on a dedicated machine (depending on how many symbols you're actually trying to keep track of in realtime). http://www.tickquest.com/product/ If you don't need realtime scanning, but just want to run a scan at some point(s) during the day, then I have found AmiBroker to be the cheapest solution. http://www.amibroker.com/
Radar screen is free, if you open an account and make a few trades with them, have you considered this option?
Caroch, what charting / trading software are you using now? It would make a Radarscreen-like program much cheaper if you could use your existing data feed(s). I used StockWatch Pro (with eSignal feed) a year ago, but I thought their customer support was very slow and they just refused to fix some glitches, so I gave up on them. Since eSignal is making no attempt at all to catch up with TradeStation, I keep thinking of switching to get Radarscreen (and other TS features). Why did you give up on TS?