I need a little guidance here. I have been trading in an office for 2 years and making the move to home based office for half of the work week. My problem is I really have no idea what I need as far as memory and speed for a nice fast, fluid system. If any of you computer guru`s out there can give me some advice I would greatly appreciate it. Just a little background, I use the Redi-Plus front end and AIQ systems for analysis. /and plan on using 2 17inch monitors.
The first PRIORITY is to make sure that you have HIGH SPEED Broadband access. Nothing else will matter if you don't. 512mb of RAM on a Windows XP-Pro operating system is standard proceedure. Dell is practically giving away their Dimension 8300's on the Refurbished Site, complete with new warranty for the low $800's. The 8300 comes with the latest Intel-875 chipset and quickest 800 Mghz Front Side Bus, and 400 mghz dual-channel memory. If you want to get a little "trickier" and have some applications that require a quicker Hard Drive, take a look at the Western Digital Serial ATA Drive called the Raptor. It is super fast, has similar transfer rates as SCSI Drives and costs a fraction of the price. Costs: $199.00 for the full kit on Dell's Outlet Site. Anything more than this is OVERKILL.
i use two laptops that are 500mhz, with a margi card so i can use an additional monitor. first laptop runs quotetracker and IB's trading interface, and 2nd runs chat and other shit. i only trade 1 thing so desktop real estate is not a huge deal for me. main thing to focus on is the redundancy of things....with laptops i get battery backup automatically. i have wireless in my place but my trading laptop is hardwired into the LAN. my phone has speed dial to get me out of a profitable trade if that goes down. automatic stop losses are always entered upon taking each trade to hedge the dsl loss, if it occurs. this automatic stop loss is farther away than my simulated stop loss and is only there for this reason.
Do yourself a favor and get an emergency power unit (uninterruptible power supply unit). You'll hate it when the storm comes and knocks out your power while you're in the middle of a trade.
Why dont you just buy a level or two off the latest greatest fastest proc (at pricing sweet spot), get at least 512 mgs DDR, XP or WIN 2000 , the rest is irrelevant. i just bought a P4, 512 mgs DDR from Dell for 400 bucks after rebates.
You've got a baseline on the system you used in the office, so start from there. If you are a pro (ie supporting yourself and your family by trading) then you do not need one broadband - you need two. You can buy a router to hook up your LAN (that's geekspeak for the network inside your house) to a DSL and a cablemodem. Be sure to put your network gear on a UPS as well. If the power drops and only your PC is running, all you can do is play games. Most folks recommend a backup PC. I've got one, but I've never had a problem with my main. More RAM is almost always better than more or faster disk. You'll need 256 meg, and I encourage you to get a gig. Get a Lian-Li case. You'll never go back to cheap Anatechs again. Consider using Matrox Dual G450s for multi-mon. Cheap and good enough for charts. Check out reviews at places like SharkyExtreme, Anandtech and others. Get the best prices on hardware at pricewatch. Look for sweet deals on hardware in the hot deals forum at Anandtech The fastest CPU always costs a lot more than the one behind it. Choose your price point carefully. It's unlikely that you will want the fastest or the next-to-fastest. Design your system so that you can get at least one CPU upgrade before you have to swap out other components. Run XP or Windows2k. Study the info on the different chipsets, and particularly benchmarks. I only do this when I am designing a new system or an upgrade - been a while so I'm not current and cannot give you any advice on which is best. That's about all I have off of the top of my head. Good luck! Building your own system is very satisfying and you can design a better system that costs less money than the name brands.
I have been looking for a refurb Dell with 512 or 1G of ram and the dual head card to run 2 monitors, and they are flying off the shelf. i kept thinking about it last week and missed one after another for min $1000. Off hand does anyone know if people buy them to resell at Ebay or the like? Everything I looked at flew out the door.