Dell still sells many machines with Windows XP as an option. Click on the "Small & Medium Business" option from their home page.
the 8800 is an overkill for trading, but great for games. the difference being most charting software use simple graphics compared to the complex 2D/3D AA/AF shading used in action games. Dell (and a few brands too) allows you to downgrade the Vista to WinXP. This option is not widely advertized.
8 is a lot, but 4 is nothing nowadays. Memory is cheap anyway. Vista caches alot of things on RAM. When you click on something, Vista gives you instant response. Not because Vista is faster, but because Vista is utilizing the RAM a lot more than XP. e.g. searching the Vista directory is a breeze; a picture can pop up on Vista immediately while it will take 1.5 seconds on XP.
Linux is a great OS, but it will never make popular prime time. Not because I said so, but because of the popular vote. p.s. Vista is full of it alright, but the full implementation of Linux (whether it is server or workstation) is not small either.
Gnome: Thanks for pointing me in the Vostro direction. It does have the WinXP option. I'm assuming that I could continue to use my Matrox video card provided I took the XP option. Is that correct? As an aside, do think the Vostro will function well as a trading type machine? OldTrader
yeah, should work fine. the Vostro 200 comes with 2 PCI slots which work with old stuff (and 2 PCIe slots). No AGP though. The machine in general is fine. Get lots of Ram though.
Don't necessarily agree with "get lots of RAM". The correct amount is "enough so that a modest amount remains available.. above what your system is using when all of your apps are running". For many people, that will be only 512MB... I know, that's heresy.... But if you check your Task Manager and Physical Memory Available, you'll see how much "room" you have. Buying excess RAM is mostly a waste of money. The reason "lots of RAM" is probably not really necessary is because Windows is quite efficient at paging out lower priority functions and leaving plenty of physical RAM available, "just in case" it's needed. Of course anybody can buy 2-4G of RAM, but if it just sits there unused, why have it? As for Vista... what little bit I've read (and that's been only a little because I have zero interest in ever running it myself) says that Vista trys to "cache almost everything" during a session. In Vista's case, perhaps "the more RAM the better".
OldTrader If you plan to get a new Dell to run 4 monitors, the new Precision T3400 is worth a serious look. It allows the use of 2 PCIe x16 display cards, and can be configured with 2 Quadro NVS 290 cards which, as gnome pointed out previously, is one of the best graphics cards for trading (and relatively inexpensive to boot). 2 NVS 290 cards support a total of 4 (DVI) LCD panels. Happy trading! wwx
If you get 290's, you'll probably have to buy new from a retailer... they just are not that common yet. Cost for 2, approx $300. Or, you could get 2, 285s on eBay for around $60 -$80. The 290s have 256MB VRAM (specifically for Vista), the 285s [mostly... the earliest ones have 64MB RAM, but availability is low] have 128MB VRAM. Both are "overkill" for trading. (That G200 OP is concerned about has only 32MB VRAM to run 4 monitors... 8MB/monitor... and that is adequate. And I used to run the same program setup I have now with 4 ATI singleheads, each with only 4MB RAM... even they never skipped a beat.)