hi !! yes ..tell us if it is a real time program with a macro of analysis that runs evry....5 seconds... or a end of day.. that tells you signals for the next day.. i have 400 workbooks open at a time..and 2 gb are good for me.. maybe a vista standard with 3gb is always very good with absolute margin of safety for you.. possibly think about buyng ecc memory with errror check if your sistem must be active for many hours a day and run like a server obviously im talking about a desktop pc... if you dont need continuous calculation every dual core laptop.. with 2 gb and more than a t7300 should be good.. i used my laptop for making development and it worked well.. but my desktop pc is more powerful and has automatic switch on so it works better !! i have an acer laptop for gaming too but dell has auto switch on on rtc or we will make you spend a lot for watching videos on youtube !! )
if you need to do a single calculation, open your vb editor for excel (go in options and displey the button for opening it in your excel main page ) ) find the macro you need to speed up and try adding this at the beginning Application.Screenupdate = false and this at the end Application.Screenupdate = true your problem is not an old pc.. your problem is a terrible code !!! maybe with excel 2007 and the new you can have worst performance or non significative improvement than now if you dont clean it.. i can post some rules for you if you can understand what i will talk about.. so open your vb editor and lets do it !!
Only if you lack the competence to build it yourself. Otherwise, I agree with maxpi's post, get an Intel mobo and start from there. You'll spend way less for the same performance that Alienware gives you.
Clearly the way is VB. I coded myself several quite complex Excel spreadsheets. It always ends up slow, unreadable, uncustomizable, unadaptable and sometimes even unstable. With VB you have many advantages: - Much more speed (it may feel incredible fast in the first place) - Crystal-clear code (if you care about comments and stuff) - Easy interfacing to other programs (SPSS, charting) - You may find many new things that can be done that were just impossible with Excel As a fossil I recommend good old VB6 (can be learned faster, more ressources online, many concepts more straightforward than in .net). You asked for a book: Hard to recommend one (depends on your personal preferences and existing experience) - better look in a bookstore and find what suits your style.
dude, I'm running Excel 2002, off the IB feed and heavy realtime ES DDE (every tick) event processing. I have all sorts of chart and other plugins attached to the code. Other than a recent compile bug I had to work around, this sheet keeps up nicely RUNNING ALONGSIDE OTHER CPU HOGS. So your claim that Excel cant keep up is bogus. Its mostly the programmers that cant keep up.
still in simulation !! now im making big scan of the pattern... but few page is going fine .. and i will need to keep scanned with high precision near of them continuously.. obviously for 1 title only !!! for more titles maybe i will need more computers !! bb !!
I don't know how often your spreadsheet is being loaded/saved to disk or how much disk access is taking place while it's running, but you may want to invest in a solid state hard drive which is a hard drive comprised of flash memory (like you have in a camera). I have one of the new Samsungs in my MacBook Pro and it's an absolute screamer, something like 220 megabytes/s sustained read and write, which may be useful for your application. If this machine were only for trading I could easily get by with a 16GB drive as I don't need a lot of software for trading, and they can be bought for far less than a 256GB model.