its probably out of warranty, however, he should contact Sager in Kalifornia, and have them do service on it. It should not be doing, as you say it does. It shouldn't.
This is from HP site: http://www.shopping.hp.com/cgi-bin/...ries&subcat1=rts&cat_level=1&browse_link=true
good to hear from you again...now, I really appreciate your comments.... wow, 2.5lbs, huh...whewwwww.... that's heavy hey, the 3.2Ghz 2GB 160GB HDD 7200 DVD/RW 54g wireless luggable can crunch numbers in Excell better than you can.... anyways, its in the multiple dimensional analysis that signal processing applications put upon the processor that counts. These DA (direct access) software applications connected to a MDVF (market data vendor feed) combine to produce some 30 or more active processes all vying for realtime processor and bandwidth access. Add to that your JTrader or other order entry and trades monitoring sub-screens, and you place some serious workstation like demands upon your processor/machines. Add to that one or two active IE/NSCP browser panels or instant messenger or speech recognition applications (squawk box apps, or talking room sessions) and you have your very definition of why such robustness is needed. if your Toshiba does all that during trading hours, then hats off to you, and I will look in another direction for future sourcing of machines.
Interesting. I went to Sager website and reconfigured it to match all the things that come in the HP built-in, the price came to $2,395.00. So to get the same configuration you pay more for the Sager. It's still a sweet deal. TM Trader
how bout this baby? http://www.alienware.com/Configurator_Pages/area-51m.aspx?SysCode=PC-LT-AREA51-M&SubCode=SKU-EXTREME
Lots of power comes in small packages these days. Don't know how extensive or big a CPU-sucker your "multidimensional signal processing/analysis" app is, but all the other normal trading applications combined don't pose a significant resource consumption - at least not for a 1 GHz P4M processor with 1 GB of RAM (especially when you consider that you can very easily run a sizable trading station on a mere 400 MHz P2 w/ 512 MB of RAM without ever maxing the CPU). Of course, I'm admittedly not engaging in computing wormhole initiation energy metrics, hyperdimensional transit dynamics, reengineering DNA in reatime, or powering The Matrix while I'm on the road or sitting in a Starbucks - alas, I have to leave those idle pursuits to the teraflop machine in the den. L( But it is pretty hard to exhaust a 1GHz/1GB config with most normal apps and you don't have to do a Quasimodo impersonation lugging around a 12+ pound PC bag