Well, I've had some BSOD's if that's what you mean. But I've never had any kind of freeze, lockup, or delay (except when eSignal was having problems, of course... and then many subscribers had it) while my trading setup was running. Not even from Java. My first computer... I guess it was on DOS. I didn't even have a floppy drive.. it ran on a tape drive like a cassette player.. My first trading rig ran on DOS 3.1, if I recall. Yeah, $254 for my trading machine is a bit ridiculous. My MAIN rig (data, charts, 4-monitors, TV tuner, etc.)... that's different. It was $569.
I still have an old Dimension 4550. I don't remember if I paid $299 or $399 but it works great. I use it for e-mail, surfing, autocad, photoshop, etc. and it does great for all that stuff. I used to have an account with OptionsXpress because I liked the products they have (they really do have good stuff like securities futures, etc.). Problem is their junk java system freezes all the time. On a normal day it's a struggle to get past the opening bell. The baddest ass machine in the world will not do any good. Junk is junk. Not knowing at the time where the problem was I built my super system almost a year ago. Then when seeing that junk java system still freezing I got ahold of their top tech person there who told me "Stop spending money; it's not your end it's the software. Java is junk and it always will be." I'm sure the CEO would not like to hear him say that although it is the truth. I promptly opened an account where I can use Trading Technologies and it rocks. Do I regret spening money on a kick ass system? No. Did I have to spend the money? No. Am I confident there will not be any system created problems at this end over the next 5-10 years? Yes. That's worth peace of mind. I'm sure this old Dimension would handle trading in normal conditions but that's not what I want. I want what I know will handle more then the most volatile market can throw at it and that's what it does.
Well, I wasn't thinking of legacy stuff when things were cheaper... Mine are all new this year.... C2Ds and all.
I looked into that once and if I recall it was either difficult or impossible. The recommendation was to just let Windows handle it.
Task Manager affinity feature is not enough? I remember there are also utilities that save your core-->processes setup each time you boot your pc.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bang-dual-processing-buck,815-2.html If you click the dropdown on that page and go back one page, there's a utility available but it has mixed reviews. Also not sure if that utility is for "dual cpu" systems or "multi-core" cpu's. But task manager has a means to set what core something runs on (shown on the page on that link above). So if trading has one core and charting another core and then all Bill Gates' trash on other cores, that's about the best we can do.
I think that's about as good as it gets for now. There is a recent utility out which automatically increases the active title bar's app priority to High.
You mean someone with a brain is actually involved in making software? Holy guacamole!!!!! User input is actually given priority? I'm in shock!!!!
In dual and quad core systems, I doubt more than one core is used all that much... unless you're running 2 cpu-intensive apps at the same time. Perhaps if one app has a higher priority it will get one core to itself and everything else will access another core...??