here are my CPU and software specs Also, I am running Esignal 10.0.1 I don't use this CPU for execution, only Esignal and Excel would be running.
1. Your "using a lot of RAM" I suspect is from Excel. Might try not running and see if system still seems slow. 2. Rarely when a system is slow, the fault is in video hardware. 3. Your video cards are adequate for trading. 4. Your CPU and RAM are adequate for trading. 5. You could change your setup to get rid of the XP eye candy... that slows things down for sure. I would say that you may not NEED an upgrade... just hunt down that which is causing your system to be slow. If worse comes to worse, get another hard drive and replace the one you have. (Don't mess with your current one... you'll want to put back in and run if troubleshooting doesn't quickly find the problem.) Then, do a fresh install of WinXP on the new hard drive and run your eSignal alone. See if it's slow. Then, add Excel and see if it's slow. Check your RAM usage and see if it's significantly changed. Don't add your upkeep utilities until after you've tried the above. It could be that all you really need is a fresh OS install. However if you do a fresh OS install and it's still slow, then you could use more grunt. And any modern video card which will fit into a PCIEx16 slot will be plenty more powerful than what you have... though again, the video power is not really necessary for trading. BTW... My Winsig is using only 50MB of RAM while yours is 346MB. Maybe something there for you... then again, maybe that is OK as I don't use eSignal charts, just the data.
As suggested, first rebuild the software system starting with a clean formatted disk and an OS reinstall. Make sure you get the latest drivers for your components especially your video cards. I use lots of ram too (on purpose) but that doesn't slow things down - using ram is often a good thing. New cpu's are cheap as are good enough motherboards. I'd get an e8500 or e8400 level core2duo and a motherboard to support them and enough graphics cards for future expansion from either asus or gigabyte. After that I'd consider a new video card. I'd start with your current 2G of ram and look for faster ram if you are not getting good results and its 667mhz ram instead of 800M or 1G.
Thanks for the comments Gnome. Do you know how much RAM your charting system is using? I use Esignal for data and charts (about 17 windows, i.e. charts and t&s) What eye candy on WinXP are you referring to? Please forgive my technical ignorance
Thx for the comments Kiwi. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115036 Would the above product improve my performance, and if so, in your opinion, by how much? What about a quad core? Is my NVIDIA vc sufficient? Should I buy the same video card for my other two monitors?
I run about 600MB before FF memory leakage... and about 100MB of that is from my TV tuner. The "eye candy" is all of XP's colored borders and such. You can speed up your system if you turn all of that stuff off.... You really should go through doing a fresh install of your OS and your software to see if your slowness is caused by software or just a collection of HDD schmutz. If you have such a problem, speeding up the hardware won't help very much. The computer you're running is somewhat like the D8300 I used to use. I replaced it with a new C2D, faster RAM, and faster video cards... but my perception of "system performance" did not improve as much as I thought it would. So, if you can clean up your system software wise, you might find your computer is much faster than it has been.