Anyone running Qcharts and Vista? First day on a new computer with Vista and noticed that I couldn't get over-night sessions on the Futures. After playing with it for a while and calling tech support (no help yet) I found that in Tick mode it shows the after hours data. But not on any other bar setting. The YM only shows data from 9:30 on instead of from the 8:30 open. Everything stops just before the 16:00 bar. The overnight sessions button has no effect. Ninja-Trader had a bug with Vista but got a fix (I don't use Ninja). I wonder if this is a similar thing. I also tried changing the compatability settings to XP for Qcharts but it didn't help. Anyone else having trouble or do I get to be the guinea pig? -EZ
Got a reply back from Tech support. Qcharts is not Vista compatable. They will release a compatable version later this year. "Later this year" doesn't sound promising as they still have bugs in their 6.0 beta. So if ya gotta use Qcharts, don't upgrade to Vista. Also having a few other Vista problems like trouble downloading from an FTP site. And some other misc online stuff - could be IE 7.0 though. - EZ
Case in point, vista sucks. It was an udate for micro$oft, it doesn't benefit the end user in any way. Most of the new features are so minimal, for the hassle of upgrading to vista with all the driver conflicts and such.
Found a temporary work around. Vista doesn't let the MktHours.inf or CorpActs.inf files update. Shouldn't be too hard to get a patch soon. Qcharts/Esignal is working on the problem. This affects the hours displayed, and also stock splits. If you need the workaround check the Esignal forum's Qcharts section and ask, or PM me. Regards, - EZ
Hmm, it is up the anybody wether to like or dislike Microsoft (Windows) and its kind of monopoly position in the OS market. On the other hand - as a newbie in the trading SW and data provider environment - I am getting the feeling that it isn't much better there, respectively it is getting worse. eSignal acquired QCharts and changes (or integrates) everything making the product worse, e.g. by reducing the unlimited simultaneous data to 200 - what a huge difference! At the end, this is just a way of getting rid of a competitor for eSignal, to enter a similar monopoly position in trading data for non institutional traders. While, if one hates MS Windows which is a commercial product for quite a price, one can always switch to cheaper or even free OS alternatives. Here it is the other way around. QCharts was a much cheaper alternative with in some instances better offering (unlimited vs. eSignal always limited simultaneous data), which now gets significantly downgraded, not to say becoming totally worthless. And I am not an MS lover at all, e.g. I bought Vista realizing no single advantage over XP (yet). But I still believe it is an application vendors job to adopt its SW to a new OS version of the market leader and not the other way around. Vista will end up on 500 million machines (or whatever), while QCharts on, I dont know, 5000? How can someone sell a SW running on MS Windows not being capable of getting its programm to work on Vista's release date, an OS we all know for years to come and betas around for many months too? And one thing I would like to mention about trading SW in general. They often remind me on old Windows 3.1 application as their user interfaces are wll outdated in almost all cases. Well, the quality of an application for trading should not be measured in terms how cool it looks, but you can get much nicer and more reliable SW for many purposes as a freeware/open source. And trading SW in most cases is not cheap at all. I remember, as an old MS DOS user, that I refused to install that "unnecessary" Windows when it came out. But than a friend showed me this incredible tool called Excel. So I had to go for it! Than I was always complaining about this and that, until I purchased some MS stocks. This has developed nicely since then, and, generating money with something lets you take it easier while rebooting after yet another crash.
I don't want this to turn into a bash Vista thread, but the main problem is the memory usage. Not RAM but the CPU. The new Desktop manager, with windows explorer, and IE7.0 use so much processing memory that I keep spiking the CPU usage - and it freezes. This didn't happen on XP, and I really liked XP as it cleared up many problems I had with '95 and 2000. So if I keep having too much trouble, I might have to buy XP. As far as the other software issues, it seems that it's just minor windows Vista security issues/permissions that should be easy to make a patch for. The irritating part is this system has 3x the RAM and more processing speed (plus the dual core chip) of my old one, and the old one ran better. -EZ
One option is simply to buy the xp 64 bit edition. It has the improved memory handling capabilities of vista but none of the other crap. Runningbear
Here is the fix to get Qcharts to run properly, Thanks to the guys on the E-Signal board: R-click "QCharts.exe" in your QCharts folder. Turn ON - "Run as administrator". Another R-click "QCharts.exe" and select/click "Properties" at the bottom of the menu. In Properties dialog... Click Compatibility tab. Turn ON "Run This program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2) Restart QCharts. --------------------------------- Windows will probably ask you to "Allow" Qcharts to run everytime you start it, but at least it works now. Haven't figured out how to automatically allow it yet.
Here is a link to a site that has a camtasia movie showing how to make Qcharts run with Vista. http://www.qcsoftwarehelp.com/Movies.htm It's movie #10. - EZ