I'm in the market for a new machine, probably a laptop since I have 2 desktops. I have not been able to find one with XP. Everybody says Softy not supporting that anymore. I use IB TWS and Ensign. Appreciate hearing from anyone using Vista with these progams.
1. Microsoft supporting XP until at least 2014. 2. Dell Small Business lines still have XP available on notebooks.
that techbargains looks likem a good site for pc's the hp looks good for 700 bucks don't know what to do with 750 gigs of harddrive space
I recently bought a desktop for trading, Gnome and Landis' advice was very helpful. I have about 20 charts open. I decided to try and future proof my system as much as possible. I got a Dell Precision T3400 with duo core 3Ghz, 2 Gigs of RAM, 160 GB hard drive. I did swap out the NVS290 video card for one that can handle 2 30 inch monitors at the highest resolution. The refurb'ed Dell cost me $710 plus the $50 video card. You can pick up good 20-24 inch monitors for 200-400 each. My eyes don't like TN panels so I went with a 30 inch IPS - found a HP for 800 refurbed. So, for $1600, I've got a system that'll probably last me a decade and that would have cost at least $3000 brand new. But it hasn't improved my trading AT ALL
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145034 $32 AR. $27 couple days ago. free S&H.
Bought this yest at Best Buy $399 for a laptop. So far so good. I have TWS and Ensign runnng on it. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8933005&type=product&id=1215216329460
It does without any problems, as well as other trading/charting software (I've tried a lot just out of curiousity to see if it works under Vista)... I know it sounds funny as I advocated Linux just a few days ago in some Vista related threads, but things happened in such a way that I've bought a new desktop which had Vista pre-installed (it was a very attractively priced - kind of a sale devoted to beginning of new academic year) and so I didn't mess with chosing a machine w/o OS and just took this one and so far don't change Vista to Linux to be sure all h/w is OK and not void a warranty by changing entire OS and to just try out what Vista is in real life. Well, I must say that Vista indeed seems better to me than XP was at first from security point of view: MS has a very bad habit of making default user "root" (with admin rights) and that's what causes a lot of security troubles in Windows, but if user himself is a little bit smarter than idiot he/she will add a non-admin user name and use it mainly, leaving admin for administrative purposes only. Well, Vista has realized a security mechanism similar to "sudo" of UNIX and it's a great step forward to better security along with some other additions... It is a memory hog of course compared to XP and using Vista on 1G RAM machines is absolutely not the way to go (all vendors who sell 1gb RAM machines with Vista pre-installed in my opinion commit a crime of blatant lie to customers that those machines are fully Vista compatible), but with enough h/w resources it's definetely not any slower than XP... Haven't found any bugs so far too yet. Of course all above is only OK if hardware used is fully supported by Vista. I must say that I still am going to get back to Linux as soon as play enough with Vista but still this experience is an interesting one and conclusion is: running Vista on modern machines with good enough h/w and this h/w being Vista compatible is not that bad at all and Vista is not always = problems.
I don't want to put my software hat and talk about Vista nd XP. I have used both of them. Now I am trying to learn Ubuntu. Both XP and Vista are perfect (with a grain of salt). many people have problem with installing Vista on old PCs. If you buy a PC with installed Vista , you should be fine. You will spend one month getting yourself familiar with the environment. Other than that, you woul be fine. I spent $300 to build my own PC using the old case. I bought dual core AMD 2.6GHZ, 500 G HD, CD/DVD player, 4G ram. I also bought 22 inch Acer monitor from Circuit city. If you have AAA membership, you can get 8% coupon for your CC purchase from AAA website. I don't recommend building your won system.
Do yourself a favor and avoid issues by purchasing your memory from Dell should you buy a Dell Workstation such as the T3400 Precision Workstation. Sometimes the memory is made by Crucial. Sometimes it is made by Nanya, or others. I am running 4 Gigs of Dell "branded" PC2-6400 "400 MHz" memory ( it's actually made by Nanya of Taiwan ) in my T3400. It has a CAS latency of 6.0 and timings of 6-6-18. They run sales every now and then and you can usually get anywhere between 15%-25% off. If you are purchasing anything other than a Precision Workstation, you should have no problem with obtaining suitable memory from CRUCIAL. They even have a cool "scanner" on their website that will tell you what kind of memory your computer is running. http://www.crucial.com/