Gnome, has good advice. When I built my last computer I was in a trading room and one of the people was up to date on computer components and had very sound advice that he freely gave out if asked. His advice saved me quite a bit of time researching and his advice saved me a few dollars in terms of realizing I didn't need a Quad core top of the line and all the other top of the line goodies for trading. I think thats one of the big fantasies for traders is that they need the high end gamer rig for trading when that just isn't so. A middle of the road is more than enough in most cases, unless you are Maestro. ) Someday I'll go ahead and build a monster for the fun of it, but for now the wife would kill me....uhh.. I mean I don't need it.
....i am using xp on a new vostro..... .... tested out puppy linux..... specifically macpup foxy.... .... internet is twice as fast..... .... trading platform is twice as fast.... ....going to install a linux swap partition...... ....this things boots off of a cd.....and can still use the linux swap partition..... while running from ram ....tried previous versions of puppy.... running within ram.... but my available ram would eventually run down......without a swap partition ..... am running this version with no swap installed yet..... and my ram is running strong and not decreasing.... ....it is amazing how much faster a computer runs when the os is so much smaller than windows....