I was running on a 400 Mhz Pentium under W2000 until recently. I ran RealTick, its Talnet data feed server, IB java app, EXCEL, and 2 customer written VB apps, that drove data off TALNET. And it all ran on my 400 Mhz Pentium, with 128 MB of memory. Then, IB's memory footprint became much larger, growing to 32 MB, and I was swapping out to disk all the time, when I switched between apps, and this killed me. I now have a 3.0 Ghz Xeon, with 1 GB of memory, and I have all the resources I can handle. Suggest you look at RealTick for your quotes. They extremely economical in terms of bandwidth and CPU utilization. My current system is overkill, but I bought for the future.
Dedicated 1, you stated your CPU gets maxed-out. Is this really the case? Have you opened up Task Manager while running your data software and seen how much CPU % is being used? (I use Win 200PRO and not XP, but I assume both have Task Manager) If you open Task Manager, then click the Processes tab, you can see exactly what is running and how much of the CPU it is using. If you are close to max-ing out the CPU, then you may have a virus or trojan program running. I have seen that happen before. Run an anti-virus, and see if that helps. If not find out which program is hoging the CPU and why.
There's no way your CPU is maxed out from "several highly liquid stocks". Besides an anti-virus you'll also want to run Ad-Aware or SpyBot. I had the problem trendy talked about, now fixed thanks to Spybot.
I just recently upgraded my mine to a p4 2.8g 800fsb 1g ram and the problems went away. Intel's hyperthreading is the real deal. I am able to do 2 or 3 applications (like having real tick and 4 QT running on 4 different monitors) simultaneous without any hiccup.
I upgraded recently to a Dell Dimension 8300 and would like to make one comment about the "HYPER-THREADING" feature that comes from Intel. First off, most of the software out there does not have Hyper-Threading capability so this feature is lost on many of our trading applications. Secondly, the 800 Megaherz front-side bus is only "mildly" quicker than the 533 FSB. Moreover, in order to take full advantage of the DUAL CHANNEL capability of the 800 FSB, ( which is basically a 200 Mghz FSB that is QUAD pumped ) make sure that your memory is of EQUAL SIZE MODULES. Do not, and I repeat, do not mix your memory modules with unequal memory! In otherwords, if you have 4 memory slots and want 1 full gig of memory, go: 256, 256, 256, 256. Do not go: 512, 256, 256. Testing has shown that you lose almost 25% in performance if your memory moduels are mixed.
Actually if you want a gig of memory you'd be better to install a matched pair of 512mg sticks. Runningbear
if cpu maxes out, it's a video card issue. Minimum requirement is 64 megs per monitor. If cpu is not maxing out, and there is still a problem, then its either the memory is low, internet connection is slow, or quote provider is slow.